 Ssssssss Astronk Time to dive into the dark murky world of Super Nintendo Dungeon Crawler ports. This one is called Dungeon Master originally made by FTL games, for the Atari ST back in 1987 before getting ports for the Amiga, DOS, Apple II GS, the Sharp X68000, the PC-9801, the FM Towns, the Sony R520 WLT microwave, the TurboGraphic CD, and the Super Nintendo, and I only made one of those up. This was one of the most popular PC games of its time. If you owned an Atari ST, you probably owned this game. It won a ton of awards. In 1988, it won a special award for Autistic Achievement from Computer Gaming World Magazine, along with all sorts of Game of the Year awards and nominations for Atari ST and Amiga in particular. But that's all for PC. What about the Super Nintendo port? Well, it was also made by FTL and published by JVC, and it's, you know, one of those clunky home console ports of a PC game that tries its best for better or for worse. And I don't mean that as a bad thing. Some SNES PC ports are still fun to play today, like Wing Commander or SimCity. But Dungeon Master is definitely one of those games where it helps to know what you're getting yourself into before you play it. Like I said, it's a first-person dungeon crawler, which is another way of saying you're gonna need the instruction manual, which is thankfully easy to find through a simple Google search, and you open it up and holy crap, I didn't realize Tolstoy wrote Super Nintendo instruction manuals. The story section is 18 pages, and it reads a lot like a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. I love stuff like this, and it's actually written really well. It tells the story of your character Theron, who is summoned by the Great Lord to find four champions that can find the fire staff to defeat the evil Lord Chaos. And that's how the game starts. You wander around this dungeon and pick four out of twenty-four different characters for your party, and you go around and look at each person's portrait, and you read their sales pitch as to why they should fight for you, and then you start your quest and fight enemies like skeletons, tree things, mummies, and other various monsters, and to fight, you have to select whatever item is in your character's hand, and you gotta hover the cursor over that and press B to bring up some options, or you can just select the enemy and press A to do a normal attack. To cast a spell, you have to move the cursor over the three bars up top, that's pretty much each character's current status more or less, and you press the B button over that to flip through your Rolodex of Spells. You also have to manage food or water for everyone, and you do that by picking stuff up off of a dungeon floor, like a perfectly prepared loaf of bread just sitting there. It makes me wish there was a food network show that would teach me to make all sorts of different kind of video game food, whether it's floor bread from this game, or the wall turkey from Castlevania, or that delicious looking oil barrel beef in Final Fight. On the surface, this may seem like every other game of its kind, but Dungeon Master was the first game to use what's called the Paper Doll Interface to manage armor, weapons, and items, and it works exactly as described. To equip a weapon, just select it and drag it to an open hand to use one example. If you want to eat something to get health, just shove some food in your mouth. Unfortunately, you can't shove a sword in your eye to kill yourself if you reach a dead end, but I appreciate how simple the interface is, and it's held up well over time even if it is a little odd. I also appreciate how simple navigation is. You just use the D-pad to move forward, backward, or strafe, and the L and R buttons to turn. You might be surprised at how often home console ports screw this up, or maybe not, I don't know. But you toggle between moving and using a mouse cursor with the select button, and I should mention quickly that no, this game is not compatible with the SNES mouse. The user interface overall is pretty goofy and understandably so, and it's one of those things where this is just what was standard at the time, and it works well enough, even if it is pretty dang slow to do even the most simple tasks. No weird dungeon crawler game is complete without a bunch of bizarre, made up stuff that doesn't make any intuitive sense, and dungeon crawler is no different. Because here we have an entire bar of symbols on the right part of the screen here, if you want to use magic, you have to use the cursor to select each symbol to put in the right order to do the right spell. Yes, that's right kids, back in the day you couldn't just have one button to do a magic spell. You actually had to mix everything together yourself, and you screw up and you blow yourself up like Waila E. Coyote and try again. And once again you're gonna need the manual to decipher what all this crap is. Usually in games like this, I have to comment on the music because when a game is this static and by proxy boring, you need to have a kick-ass soundtrack to keep the action moving, and this game kinda does that, but this is one of those game soundtracks that oscillates wildly between some sweeping classic RPG music like this. To this kind of stuff where I'm suddenly in a comic relief scene from Robotrack. What am I playing Lost Vikings all of a sudden? The whole game goes back and forth like that, it's kind of odd, especially considering the original PC versions of this game didn't really have the music at all. So yeah, the Super Nintendo port of Dungeon Master is one of those games that's tricky to recommend, because if you like dungeon crawlers like this, then yeah, you'll dig this game, but if you're not into it, then Dungeon Master isn't the game that's gonna hook you. I'd recommend starting out with something like Arcana instead, if you want to stick the Super Nintendo, or Shining in the Darkness for Sega Genesis, and if you dig those, then maybe come back to Dungeon Master sometime. This game was huge at the time it was released, it's the best-selling Atari ST game of all time, and it was clearly made by people who love games like this, so if you dig first-person dungeon crawlers that have more of a comfier and slower pace, and you insist on playing them on Super Nintendo, then here you go. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.