ADG Episode 11 - Dark Ages

[@Gatorbox]

I totally had this game's soundtrack recorded on a bootleg cassette that I made and listened to in school on my Walkman. Good times. :)

[@NeilRoy]

Loved the ending. ;) And yes, I listened to the whole tune. Canon in D is one of my wife and I's favourites we used to like when we first met. That was very nice rendition.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Neil Roy So nice in fact that when I originally brought this episode over to KZbin it was Content-IDed by a "Music Collecting Society" despite how incredibly old this tune is. Even stuff that's been in the public domain for centuries isn't safe from Content-ID. :P

[@thewhyzer]

First game I beat in 2022! Not sure why, I guess I just felt like playing a simple old game and crossing it off my backlog. I remember reloading saves whenever I lost too much health when beating a level, until I'd finish the level with the HP I'd found appropriate.

[@t3ebo986]

I WAS 5, 100% IMMERSION WAS ACHEIVED. Nostalgia bomb ❤️

[@ScottBeebiWan]

Trick for the distracting screens: Slowly close your eyes until it's not as distracting.

[@7thDementia]

Every time I rewatch this, I always let the end song play. It’s a part of the video, ain’t it? XD

[@dhoffnun]

Haha... I love the nubby bones holding the scroll.

[@pilcrow182]

I've recently discovered your channel and have been going back through your early episodes. I got *really* excited to see that you covered Dark Ages, but... well, turns out this is a different game by the same name, and not the one I played as a kid. I was expecting a top-down RPG written in QuickBasic by Dark Knight Software (who *still* have a website at the time of this comment). Looks like they have a 2.0 alpha 2 version on their website now. No idea how it improved. I played the original 1.0 version back in '97 or '98, and it was a bit short and simplistic, but it served as a big inspiration to me as an aspiring young programmer and will always hold a special place in my heart...

[@Pixelmusement]

I wasn't aware of that one... :o

[@pilcrow182]

​@@Pixelmusement Heh, I really didn't expect a reply, commenting on a 7 year old video! But yeah, maybe you should have a look, if you like. It plays a bit like Final Fantasy 1 and 2, though it's over much faster (a couple of hours, IIRC). Some of the art is also pretty bad (it's all 'programmer art' if you know what I mean), but the game is worth trying, at least. Looks like the 2.0 version on their site is a complete Win32 rewrite, but you can still find the old DOS 1.24 version (which does work in DosBox) on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/2016/dk-software.com/da1dl.html

[@FredBednarski]

The grey face around 10:27 reminds me of ski free yeti.

[@RantingThespian]

Looks like a Chain Chomp to me.

[@therealhardrock]

A prince kidnapped and raised by a wizard who learns he's a prince? sounds like King's Quest III.

[@neotev]

Canon in d in 8 bit style. beautiful

[@W3Rn1ckz]

10:28 he’s a funny little guy

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Did this game use an earlier version of the engine also used in Duke Nukem and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure or am I mistaken?

[@Pixelmusement]

Alexandria Thorne Highly likely, though I don't know for certain.

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Yeah, the scrolling method and controls all seem identical between each game.

[@clsxalghazanth3757]

Is the Canon in D entirely from the game ?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Clsx Alghazanth Yes. Which is crazy considering how little of it you would typically hear in a playthrough. ;)

[@therealhardrock]

Do you have any other ADGs with a game that uses adlib music and PC speaker sound?

[@Alianger]

So is this the first PC game to use Adlib? Bobby Prince claims it was the first shareware PC game to use it. Edit: It seems Times of Lore, F-19 Stealth Fighter in 1988; MinerVGA, 688 Attack Sub in 1989; and STUN Runner and Zeliard in 1990 came before it.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Alianger It MIGHT be the first shareware game to use AdLib, but as you investigated, clearly not the first PC game ever to use it. ;)

[@jean-camilgirard]

hey, you're gonna upload the other episodes right? :)

[@EdmondDantes224]

First time I played this game I felt a disconnect... the music sounded too good (Sega Genesis quality) for a game that looked kinda early-to-mid NES. Speaking of music... that ending music, Pachelbel's Canon, also pops up in the NES port of Might and Magic on the title screen, and its crazy long there as well. I'm actually wondering A) why this song in particular pops up so often and B) how games can actually contain such a long tune while still having room for any other content whatsoever.

[@Pixelmusement]

A: It's a classical tune that doesn't require licensing due to how very old it is, so naturally it gets used a lot. B: Generally speaking, depending on how efficient your music routines are, each note is only going to be one or two bytes and you can get that down even further with compression, while the "instruments" are just going to be hard-coded oscillator patterns which themselves are barely going to take up any ROM space. ;)

[@EdmondDantes224]

@@Pixelmusement As for A).... there's thousands of public domain songs. I guess everyone just really likes Pachelbel's Canon (I fell in love with it because of Might and Magic). BTW, any chance Action Fighter will be a future video? I seem to recall in one of your fillers you said you got it working.

[@Pixelmusement]

@@EdmondDantes224 I'll have to double-check that because I didn't think I had my Tandy copy working under DOSBox, just the original EGA release, but it's entirely possible I did and I forgot! :B

[@Maggerama]

7:20 >I haven't really counted Somehow I don't believe you!

[@Pixelmusement]

I was just making a rough guess based on how often I hit the coin threshold in a run. Also keep in mind this video predates me scripting, which I started doing on Episode 16. :B

[@Maggerama]

@@Pixelmusement It's unscripted? That's quite a feat, I couldn't tell.

[@gameoverhell]

Everytime I see videos or screenshots of this game the same thing always bothers me. Why doesn't the prince wear some freaking pants?

[@thewhyzer]

For the improved mobility!

[@andrewdupuis1151]

its great game

[@drummyfish]

like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean like I mean

[@Pixelmusement]

+Miloslav Číž I'VE GOTTEN BETTER AT THIS (but I do still say it usually at least once per video ;)

[@tarstarkusz]

I never played this game and it looks terrible for an EGA game. This is nowhere close to what EGA can do. There are NES games that look better than this and EGA is, in most respects, better than a NES. My guess is that they had a very low bar set on the required CPU speed, since the CPU has to do all the work in an older PC.

[@NellWatson]

The minimal CPU speed was indeed very low, as I remember playing it to completion on a humble 8086.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@NellWatson There are MUCH better looking EGA games. I really don't know why he is blaming the PC and not the game. There are TGA games from the 80s that look and sound better.

[@aaronmarko]

@@tarstarkusz Yeah man. There probably ARE better looking EGA games but those are outliers and not the standard. This game was most definitely amongst the standard and not the outliers, if you dig what I'm saying.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@aaronmarko I disagree. There are many, many games on PC ega and tga that look and sound way better. All of the TGA stuff is from the 80s. While a NES can technically display more colors than TGA, it has all kinds of rules about colors that TGA and EGA don't have like 4 color tiles and 4 color sprites. The NES and other consoles enjoyed an advantage in distribution as well. They were closed systems and Nintendo got to decide if a game was published or not. So, in theory, they could prevent the worst of the worst from actually being published and making it look bad.