REVIEW: Puppet Knight
Game Title: Puppet Knight
Genre: Action
System: Mega Duck (MD009)
Developer: Commin (Sachen)
Release date: 1993
Genre: Action
System: Mega Duck (MD009)
Developer: Commin (Sachen)
Release date: 1993
You may recognise Puppet Knight as the game that popular Youtuber Stuart Ashen was surprised and disappointed to discover was not a clone of arcade favourite Joust.
In fairness, Stuart’s erroneous internet source on the matter had probably simply looked at the game’s cover art, featuring a jousting knight and taken an educated guess. It’s worth remembering, however that we are dealing with people who decided to publish a game for a console called ‘Mega Duck’ and, as such, any attempt at applying logic to the naming conventions of these games should be probably tossed out of the window.
Puppet Knight is actually a Bomberman clone and a surprisingly detailed and playable one, given the relatively ancient architecture hosting it.
You do indeed play the erstwhile knight in question (sans horse and jousting stick) and your task, in traditional Bomberman style, is to navigate a series of top-down mazes, bombing your way through the blocked off passages and trying to annihilate the enemy critters (of which ten lurk in each maze). The object of each maze is to collect the hearts that enemies leave behind in order to move on to the next stage.
The game makes use of three main power-ups that increase your character’s speed, the range of his explosions or the number of bombs he can drop at any one time. These can be boosted multiple times and your stats can be displayed whenever you push start to pause the game.
In addition, your knight can also find two other hugely useful power-ups in a bomb proof vest (allowing him to survive his own explosions) and the extremely fun manual detonator; which changes your bombs from timed explosives to manually activated devices, triggered sequentially by pushing the B button.
Seeking out the latter power-up becomes essential in later stages where enemy AI increases and there is a great sense of fun to be had in luring an enemy down a path, ducking out of the way and then manually detonating a bomb to dispose of him.
Graphically, Puppet Knight shines with nicely detailed, large sprites and a variety of different themed worlds to keep you visually interested. Aurally, the games music is decent enough, if repetitive, although It was pleasing to hear that the music does change with each new world entered, which is a nice change of pace if you find one particular tune to be bugging you.
Speaking of worlds, this is where one of the game's, and indeed the systems, peculiar quirks really does need to be addressed. The levels are hard…very hard and while that challenge never crosses the line from ‘drat, one more go’ to ‘toss the mega duck off the wall’, it can be wearisome for completionists to see that each world has a whopping seven stages to work through (six regular levels plus a score attack style bonus stage)!
I’ve no idea how many worlds the game actually has because, even plundering the games infinite continues, it took me nearly an hour and a half to make it through to level 2-3! A password system, even if it were just limited to each world, would have really helped here. While the gameplay is fun and addictive, portable games are, usually, meant for short burst of game play. You’re going to have to commit a good few of hours to beat this!
Despite its lack of originality, Puppet Knight does a good job of capturing the feel and gameplay of the 16 bit Bomberman titles on an 8-bit portable system. It has a fun range of powerups and addictive, one more go gameplay. It’s just a pity that so few gamers will ever have the free time to make it to the end of the eponymous knight’s quest and, potentially, find out what the bloody hell it’s got to do with puppets!
Score: 8/10
In fairness, Stuart’s erroneous internet source on the matter had probably simply looked at the game’s cover art, featuring a jousting knight and taken an educated guess. It’s worth remembering, however that we are dealing with people who decided to publish a game for a console called ‘Mega Duck’ and, as such, any attempt at applying logic to the naming conventions of these games should be probably tossed out of the window.
Puppet Knight is actually a Bomberman clone and a surprisingly detailed and playable one, given the relatively ancient architecture hosting it.
You do indeed play the erstwhile knight in question (sans horse and jousting stick) and your task, in traditional Bomberman style, is to navigate a series of top-down mazes, bombing your way through the blocked off passages and trying to annihilate the enemy critters (of which ten lurk in each maze). The object of each maze is to collect the hearts that enemies leave behind in order to move on to the next stage.
The game makes use of three main power-ups that increase your character’s speed, the range of his explosions or the number of bombs he can drop at any one time. These can be boosted multiple times and your stats can be displayed whenever you push start to pause the game.
In addition, your knight can also find two other hugely useful power-ups in a bomb proof vest (allowing him to survive his own explosions) and the extremely fun manual detonator; which changes your bombs from timed explosives to manually activated devices, triggered sequentially by pushing the B button.
Seeking out the latter power-up becomes essential in later stages where enemy AI increases and there is a great sense of fun to be had in luring an enemy down a path, ducking out of the way and then manually detonating a bomb to dispose of him.
Graphically, Puppet Knight shines with nicely detailed, large sprites and a variety of different themed worlds to keep you visually interested. Aurally, the games music is decent enough, if repetitive, although It was pleasing to hear that the music does change with each new world entered, which is a nice change of pace if you find one particular tune to be bugging you.
Speaking of worlds, this is where one of the game's, and indeed the systems, peculiar quirks really does need to be addressed. The levels are hard…very hard and while that challenge never crosses the line from ‘drat, one more go’ to ‘toss the mega duck off the wall’, it can be wearisome for completionists to see that each world has a whopping seven stages to work through (six regular levels plus a score attack style bonus stage)!
I’ve no idea how many worlds the game actually has because, even plundering the games infinite continues, it took me nearly an hour and a half to make it through to level 2-3! A password system, even if it were just limited to each world, would have really helped here. While the gameplay is fun and addictive, portable games are, usually, meant for short burst of game play. You’re going to have to commit a good few of hours to beat this!
Despite its lack of originality, Puppet Knight does a good job of capturing the feel and gameplay of the 16 bit Bomberman titles on an 8-bit portable system. It has a fun range of powerups and addictive, one more go gameplay. It’s just a pity that so few gamers will ever have the free time to make it to the end of the eponymous knight’s quest and, potentially, find out what the bloody hell it’s got to do with puppets!
Score: 8/10
