God Of Thunder
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Adept software 1993
Ahh the wonderful world of freeware, land of a hundred thousand craptacular games but with the occasional gem to be found. This particular game plays as an action RPG, sort of like a very simplified version of Zelda. You are Thor (the "Godda Thunda" to quote Marvel) armed with mystic Mjolnir the boomerang war hammer. You are charged by Odin, the father of the Gods, to go save the land from your evil brother Loki. Lots of walking around and solving puzzles ensues.
The game is a series of Zelda-type rooms, each one with a some kind of puzzle or maze to get through. First thing you notice is that Thor cannot "die" for real. When you bite it the room you're in resets, which is actually a good thing as some of the puzzles are really tough (some a little too tough for my tastes actually.) Most of the puzzles are pretty simple, and involve you moving a few bricks or so to get through a certain area, later on you find the standard hit the switch and get-the-item-and-give-it-to-someone-else deal going on. There are also puzzles that involve precise timing. One area has these one-eyed monsters that kill you in one hit, and the only way to get past them is to roll a couple of rocks down a short pathway and run inbetween them at the same time - not totally impossible, just really, really frustrating. There is no trick to getting past these areas, you just have to do them over and over and over again until you get it. The frustration factor may be just a little too high for most people.
The game is very primitive, so much that it will probably turn most people off. Enemies regenerate each time you enter the room. They're all quite stupid, they go along a predetermined path and won't attack you unless you're standing right in front of them. A lot of the game has you going through generic mazes and such that can get very repetitive. You do get into the game though, since it starts off rather easy and no screen is set up in such a way as to completely baffle you as to what you're supposed to accomplish. Not every action RPG out there has to have ten thousand meters for attributes and a fifty layer deep magic combo system. Someone looking for a simple time waster may enjoy this game, but most of us probably won't find the motivation to play it all the way through.
Graphics: The game is somewhat...well...crappy looking actually. Your little Thor sprite is very tiny, although it's animated decently enough. The game looks like an early NES RPG, like where trees and rocks and stuff are laid out in an obvious grid without much of an attempt to make the screen look "natural." At least the graphics are clean, there's no hint of bounding boxes around the sprites or other signs of laziness. Some of the townspeople actually look pretty funny, like this old woman who has this snaggletooth thing going.
Sound: Annoying, no other way to describe it. Whenever you pick something up Thor says "OOh!" but it's said in such a way as it sounds like "Eeew!" The rest of the sound effects are the usual bings and boings, although there are also some good quality digitized samples used. Whenever someone talks it uses a short bite that sounds like "Mee" very rapidly over and over and over, so someone talking sounds like "MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe!" which is funny, the first time you hear it.
Gameplay: Simple mazes and puzzles at first are easy to get into, but quickly become repetitive, with later difficult timing puzzles upping the frustration level to intolerable heights. The game however doesn't take itself seriously and is worth it for a laugh.
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