Little Knight Arthur - 30 year C64 game finally gets a release!

Trawling through Twitter for the latest updates, I happened to come across a Tweet from our good friend Aaron, about a new C64 game that was released only just recently. This game developed by Pasi Hytönen, was apparently started way back in 1985 and was hoping to be published in 1986, however according to him even though it was nearly complete but missing the 8th level, all of his requests to be published were rejected by different developers. And that's just a small part to the story of ' Little Knight Arthur " of which you can read here. But the news of today is, this game is finally available to play on the C64 as a 30th anniversary edition of creating the 'Master' diskette and first submitting it for a publisher for consideration

So what about the actual game story? Well in Little Knight Arthur, you are on a quest to defeat the evil Shamrock The Dragon. On the way, you will need to collect and use weapons and also figure out how to free your friends captured by Shamrock's evil gang which includes bats, spiders, snakes, and even undead creatures! This will involve a lot of jumping, platform hoping and rope climbing. So be fast or you'll die a lot!

As for the game play, this is the most difficult and frustrating game I have played for some time. Although I liked the tune and found the detail to be pretty decent, it was just way too difficult even for a first level. The enemies move to fast, there's too many of them and  you also have avoid the traps requiring precision timing to be avoided. So you will most likely die again and again before you even reach the second platform on the first level. Thus I gave up after finally spending some time avoiding the spiders going up and down only to jump on a spike.

For any game development, a first level should not put you off as much as this does, it should ease you into it such as a tutorial experience, with difficulty going up as you get further into the game. Another negative is the long wait between each death, so instead of dying and clicking the button to hurry up for a retry, you have to wait for the character to walk from one end of the screen to another.

For what it's worth even with the negatives, this game should've been accepted by publishers for a commercial release, but they should've asked for more levels instead of 7 and changed the difficulty of the game. But as is the case with all games, your opinion of it may be completely different to mine. So thankfully a download link has been provided for you to play it yourselves! Can you complete all the levels?

Links : 1) Source ( Install/Play Instructions ) 2) Download 2) Cheat Version 3) Twitter