Also the momentum to jumping is very limited - it's like you get to a certain point in your leaping arc. Here, when you try leaping out of your doom you tend to sail straight over the platform to land down another pit. You see, wee Rastan is blessed with two sorts of jumps - one a short hop which is pretty useless, and a biggie activated by pressing the jump button and the D-pad up. This can become a real bind when you get stuck in a small lava/water pit between pillars of rock. As such, accurate leaping is unnecessarily tricky. Making a jump, which is a necessary part of the game, is like working against the grain of some invisible substance. Issue number one is the stiffness of it all. That's one way of saying there are some issues. Does Rastan play well? Here's where what passed muster in yesteryear wouldn't necessarily do so today.
But the specificity of games lie in their gaminess. Sound-wise, the Master System wasn't blessed with the beefiest of chips but Taito's programmers did an excellent job of turning out atmospheric tunes, which was no mean feat. Graphically its fine and puts its 8-bit competition on the home micros to shame. Its layout differs from the coin-op, presumably to press the value-for-money button, but the core gameplay is exactly the same. The Master System version for its part does a good job of mimicking the arcade. And can you tell what lies at the end of every level? Why, a scrap with a boss of some description. In addition to baddies there are pits to leap over, lava and water to dodge, and traps to avoid. Your sword can be traded up for a mace, a battleaxe, a fireball-shooting chopper, and various potions are dotted about to restore bits of your health or, gasp, take it away. Along the way time-limited power ups are available that lessen damage taken from enemies, as well as some nice weapons too. Quite what our friend of Smaug has done to you in unclear, but it serves as an excuse to make your way through several overworld and underground levels of light platforming, and slicing and dicing of enemy lizard men, chimeras, harpies, and other undesirables and imponderables. Heavily "inspired" by Conan the Barbarian, you are cast as the titular hero (or anti-hero, as it turns out) on a quest to slay a dragon and steal its fortune. Rastan was a Taito coin-op released in 1987. Remembering it got decent reviews at the time I knew there would still be some distance between it and its arcade parent, but it had to improve on the Speccy iteration. Fast forward in time to supposed adulthood I fancied something uncomplicated and fun to pad out the old Master System collection, and happened across Rastan going for cheap. Whatever the case I snatched it for my jolly old Spectrum as soon as I could and, well, it was a bit pants. Perhaps I'd bumped into in the arcade at the American Adventure and liked the cut of its hacking and slashing jib, or just fancied trying out life as a barbarian in a loincloth. Rastan was a beguiling game when I was a nipper, and I'm not sure why.
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