Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight
Rob Anderson of Mindscape released Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight for the Amiga in 1991. Moonstone features basic turn-based strategy and real-time hack n slash combat. Uniquely, Moonstone supports single-player, two-player simultaneous or four-player alternating gameplay.
The Amiga Version of Moonstone was programmed by Kevin Hoare and Rob Anderson; its graphics were drawn and animated by Rob Anderson, Steve Leney and Dennis Turner; its audio was composed by Richard Joseph.
In Moonstone players assume the role of a Knight constituted by three stats: Strength, Constitution and Endurance. Stats are raised via experience-point acquistion and item-usage (scrolls and potions). Arms and armor can be purchased from merchants. Encounters include healers, taverns, merchants, villages, cities, monster lairs and wizard lairs.
Knights can execute the following attacks:
- Throw Knife
- Overhead Chop
- Upward Thrust
- Backward Thrust
- Swing
- Block
- Special Defensive
- Lunge
The object of Moonstone is to explore the realm, battle foes and loot gold and treasure while in search of four keys that grant access to the Valley of Gods, where a Moonstone is found. The Moonstone must then be taken to the Moon God in Stonehenge during a specific moon-phase.
Moonstone features 1,000 frames or 2 megs of rotoscoped animation and 60 backdrop scenes and optional gore graphics.
Moonstone was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880 kB diskettes and requires 1 meg of RAM. It was not hard disk drive-installable.
Being an Amiga game, Moonstone's 2D graphics and overall presentation far exceed other cRPGs of the time, but strategy and tactics depth just aren't there. Overall, 6/10.
Moonstone IBM PC 1992
Anthony Mack and Nicholas Snape of Images Software converted the Amiga version of Moonstone to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1992. The IBM PC version of Moonstone requires 620K of free conventional RAM and dispalys in 256-color VGA 320x200. Moonstone audio supports PC Speaker, AdLib, Roland and Sound Blaster. However, Sound Blaster samples require 400K EMS via the likes of EMM386.
The IBM PC version of Moonstone was distributed on 2x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes or 2x 5.25" 1.2MB DS HD floppy disks. Moonstone extracts and installs to floppy disk or hard disk drive via Mindscape's Moonstone Install Program v1.0 by The Software Toolworks. The install size is 2.7 megs (281 files).
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