Hello, and welcome to this remake of one of the best games from yesteryear.
The game was originally written as a 16KB game for the ZX Spectrum in 1984.
Sir Lancelot has always been one of my favourite platform games and I decided that it would be my entry for the “Retro Remakes Competition 2004“. I was lucky enough that the judges liked the game and it recieved an 11th place out of 76 games.
| Disclaimer: This is an old game and I have found that it runs very fast these days…possibly to a degree that it could be unplayable. If you make sure your screen refresh rate is set to 60Hertz that might help a bit. Just be aware that it’s not designed to run as fast as it probably does. |
But this was not “just” my entry – it was also the first game I’ve finished and believe me – I’m a lot better at starting projects than to finish them, so I’ve definitely started more than one game over the years……..but this is the first finished game. Yeah.
If you don’t know the original game, then you can download it from “World of Spectrum“.
Screenshots from the Original game:
Screenshots from Remake (pictures reduced slightly in size).
CONTROLS
Start the game with the ENTER key.
Leave the game and return to the menu with the ESC jey.
Exit the game and return to Windows using the F12 key.
Use O & P to go left and right and SPACE to jump.
You can also use the LEFT, RIGHT and UP arrows.
If you, for some reason, don’t like the castle backdrop in the game, you can press 1,2 or 3 on the ‘about’ screen, to change between the castle backdrop, a tiled background and an entirely black retro’ish background.
COMPARISON BETWEEN REMAKE AND ORIGINAL
All the screens, 24 in all, are generated using the original data extracted from the Spectrum version – the same goes for positions of items, ladders, monsters & so forth. All positional data are then converted into something more useable on the run. The remake is not completely identical to the original though.
I do think that the gameplay is spot on, but some things are different though. Having only played 5 or 6 screens from the original game throughout the development period of the remake, I was a bit surprised to see that on some screens you turn into a bird, and I had completely forgotten about that. This is something I only realized during playtesting during the last few days before the deadline. By then it was too late to implement “bird mode”, so you will always take the form of Sir Lancelot himself.
Furthermore, the original sprites would fit into a 16*16 pixel square, so I designed my sprites to fit into a 40*40 pixel square, but the original sprites were mostly much smaller than the 16*16 pixels allowed whereas mine are more close to fill out those 40*40 pixels. That means that generally my sprites are a bit larger than the original ones and therefore I had to change some things during playtesting to make it possible to complete the game, because the original game was finetuned to work with sprites that were slightly smaller than mine.
So on one screen I added a ladder, shortened a ladder on another screen, slowed down a few sprites, changed a lot of sprites into the ‘snake’ sprite because it’s the smallest one and easiest to jump over, and finally widened some gaps in the level design here and there. I also changed to time allowed to finish each screen from 1000 to 1500. None of these adjustments changes the gameplay though.
CHEATMODE
I have successfully played through the whole game, so it can be finished, but some screens are pretty hard (like screen 7) so I have included a cheatmode if you’re having problems. I’m not gonna tell what it is though, but it involves pressing 3 keys simultaneously, on the mainmenu.
COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS
The game is developed on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and tested on 4 different computers with those general specs, and it seems to run just fine on those computers.
The smallest computer I’ve tried the game on is an IBM 350MHz Pentium 2 with a Geforce 2 PCI graphics card and it runs just fine on this computer. Slightly slower than on the Pentium 4, but perfectly smoothly. It also runs OK on my work computer which is a 1GHz Pentium 3 laptop – still very playable although slightly choppy, but for some reason not as smoothly as on the Pentium 2. Must be the graphics card.
LEGAL BLURB
The game is, according to rules of the Remakes Competition 2004, FREEWARE and must remain freeware and can generally be distributed however you want, as long as all the files, including this one, are present and have their original names.
I would like to ask though, that if you use this game on a CD for a magazine or somewhere else, that you contact me first – I would like to know what kind places my little project goes…also it shouldn’t be asking too much, but I would also like a copy of the magazine, CD or whatever. It’s not a requirement though.
COPYRIGHT
The original game was programmed for the Spectrum by Stephen Cargill in 1984 and released by Melbourne House.
This remake is programmed entirely by S. Borgquist – aka. Sokurah, in 2004.
The resources used in the game are a mixed bag – some are done by me and some are based on stuff I’ve found on the Internet, because unfortunately I didn’t really have the time to give the graphics the attention that they required.
I’m very satisfied with the mainsprite though, which I put a lot of effort into, and I’m also pretty happy with the speech in the game, which is all me… I had a lot of fun recording it.
Any updates to this game will be available for download on this page; http://tardis.dk
