Minotaur (1981)

Look: 9/10 I love the enemy sprites, such imaginative and mythological fun. I love love love love love the slow zoom in at the start of the game, wow. The scorpion is a fun sprite, too, and I like that you collect the Elixirs and Clubs along the way. It truly felt like the mix of adventure game and action arcade game it was meant to be: an amazingly exciting precedent for the upcoming years in my project. It was hard to get screenshots cuz the game is quite fast-paced, but just for reference . I wasn't able to get an image of the enemies, cuz again it's too fast-paced, but I love the UI. It is so clear, felt like an RPG/dungeon crawler yet also like the upcoming Konami platformers I love like Castlevania and Goonies. It really was an exciting game, particularly visually.

Play: 7/10 Weird controls (thank goodness for the manual available here ) like I mean... a and z are up and down, but left and right are... left and right? Lol. / stops movement? Ok, reminding me of getting used to the Rogue controls, but it felt worth it! Such imaginative gameplay and enemy sprites; so impressive for a microcomputer action adventure game; giving me tease for the console-era action adventure games coming up; and had all the right parts of dungeon crawler RPGs that I miss but have been skipping (without all the excess, thankfully). It was fun solving the mazes, once I got used to the controls. I never fully got used to the controls, but functioned enough.

Feel: 8/10 Unfortunately, despite the great concept, and the decent execution considering it's for a microcomputer, the microcomputer limitations are still just too significant for a successful action-adventure game. It must just be too much. I tried a couple different releases of the Apple II version, but none got smooth enough to warrant a full playthrough. I love the UI, I love the gameplay when it's working well, and I love the action-adventure genre. The controls being odd doesn't help, either, because I wasn't motivated enough to push through the clunkiness, glitchiness, and oddness of the controls. It was really fun to challenge myself to get through the first 3 levels. Despite my initial aversion to the controls, the concept and graphics did get me to push through and I got even further! I loved how I truly felt like I was playing a text adventure collecting clubs to go through the walls and solving puzzles, a dungeon crawler exploring the dungeon and going deeper, and an action game shooting at the enemies (the action part, tbh, being the weakest part particularly due to the odd controls). This game is sadly underknown, I didn't even see it mentioned in the action-adventure History Wikipedia page, though it was released contemporaneously with the mentioned Castle Wolfenstein (and achieved the action-adventure concept decidedly better than the mentioned Adventure or Superman, even tho Superman is one of my all-time favorites).

Attachment: 8/10 Yep, I definitely will replay this--not only to get further, but to show my brother when he visits next! I feel like this is exactly what he was looking for when he visited, but I was at mostly text adventures at the time. Finally, a truly action-adventure game--I would say even more successful than the arcade game, Venture, which says a lot--since during this era, arcade games tend to completely dominate microcomputer games such as this. I know I've said it a few times, but I am just so impressed by the Apple II.