Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: Hercules

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING: ‘HERCULES’.

In the late 80s, a rather brilliant beat-em-up was released, and its name was ‘Barbarian’. As with most hit videogames, ‘Barbarian’ spawned imitators. ‘Hercules’ was one such wannabe.

The game was of course based on the Greek legend. Well, really it wasn’t. ‘Hercules’ could have been like ‘Barbarian 2’ and have the player navigate a multi-screen landscape fighting the Hydra, wrestling with bulls, and engaging in other tasks based on the legend’s twelve labours.

But instead of taking that approach, Hercules has the player remain on a single screen, engaged in a one-to-one combat with a skeleton.

How odd. Wasn’t that ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ rather than ‘Hercules’?

Anyway, you are basically playing ‘Barbarian’ with that game’s beefy opponents exchanged for skeletons. Having said that, the game did attempt one novel addition. At the bottom of the screen there was a serpent wriggling along, and your adversary could only be harmed if it was standing over it. The one exception to this rule was a move called ‘Mountain Shaker’ in which Hercules clobbers a skeleton so hard that its skull gets knocked off.

Another thing that Hercules introduced to differentiate itself from ‘Barbarian’ was a task whereby icons would periodically fall from the sky, which you had to collect and put in a Greek urn. These icons represented the twelve labours. Every now and then a black spider would descend and try to snatch an icon from the urn. Unless you could get there in time and thwart it with a swipe of your club.

Once all twelve icons were collected it was on to the final level, where you have a one-to-one fight with a Minotaur (again, not really part of the Hercules legend. This creature comes from the myth of Perseus).

Ok, so the game was not a very authentic retelling of the legend it’s named after. But what was it like to play?

Not nearly as much fun as ‘Barbarian’ would be the honest answer. What mostly plagued ‘Hercules’ was a lack of variety. Getting through the levels was just a matter of routine rather than constantly adapting one’s fighting techniques to the wily ways of a well-programmed enemy AI.

All in all, it would be hard to recommend this game.

Thanks to Gremlin for the images