GOG adds the classic RPG ‘Drakkhen’ to their store

I remember playing this on the SNES back in the day and thinking that it was one of the worst games I'd ever played. I gather there are a few differences between that and the PC version, but I can't imagine it's much less of a chore to play.

People get nostalgic about the weirdest things.

this had to be one of the most ambitious titles from the late 80s. I played it on PC when it first came out. it has quite a large learning curve. figuring out the spells and remembering what they do is the main chore. they don't have any sort of readable labels in any known language. it looks based on Scottish Gaelic, but it's a customized language for the game. i'm not even sure if i ever finished this game :P i might get a wild hair and grab this, lol.

This was a very frustrating game for a child. So many opportunities to die, so little direction on where to go. Way over my head when I played it so many years ago. I remember the sequel being much more playable, probably lending to the fact it felt like a completely different game.

Off topic, but the title's resemblance to Drakengard is probably why I ignored that series on PlayStation for so many years; I got the two mixed up, and I hated Drakkhen. Of course they are nothing alike.

I kept seeing screenshots of the Amiga version of this game in Commodore magazines -- a huge source of frustration for a poor C64 owner like myself.


Last edited by walther von stolzing on 26 Jun 2018 at 9:00 pm UTC

I remember trying to play this game as a child but it was just too much for me and I did't even understand english at that time. I'll take a look, I'm curious about it.

I remember playing this on the SNES back in the day and thinking that it was one of the worst games I'd ever played. I gather there are a few differences between that and the PC version, but I can't imagine it's much less of a chore to play.

People get nostalgic about the weirdest things.

What made it so horrible ?
I was actually curios about it when i saw it.

I remember playing this on the SNES back in the day and thinking that it was one of the worst games I'd ever played. I gather there are a few differences between that and the PC version, but I can't imagine it's much less of a chore to play.

People get nostalgic about the weirdest things.

What made it so horrible ?
I was actually curios about it when i saw it.

Obviously it's been a long time and I haven't had any motivation to revisit it, but I remember that it was profoundly bad at giving directions and pretty much all controls were awkward at best. It was also quite happy to kill you outright with little indication of what you did wrong.

I kept seeing screenshots of the Amiga version of this game in Commodore magazines -- a huge source of frustration for a poor C64 owner like myself.

My experience mirrors yours in its entirety. :D

The funny thing is that in retrospect all gaming on floppy disks feels like an unbearable chore. A few years back I bought the Cloanto 'Amiga Forever' pack to get clean working ROM images & Kickstart disks, so that I could revisit all those games & software (I used to spend hours in the school lab making Deluxe Paint animations) that was out of my reach as a kid. Unless you go through the trouble of setting up complete fliplists, or learn the trick to install floppy games on a virtual Amiga harddrive, the constant disk swapping gets old pretty quickly.

I am actually enjoying playing my old C64 games from a SD card reader on a real C64 so i think i could survive that. I even think of buying myself a real Amiga. Call that a cheaper mid-life crisis than wanting a muscle car of your youth. :D

Although the emulation vs real hardware equation is not the same: On a C64 there isn't much you can do with a mouse on an emulator.

Closer to the topic at hand, i recall the adverts but when friend of mine got their hands on the actual game they said more or less the same thing than the previous posters of this thread. They did not know how to play it properly.

I never had a C64 when i was a kid. My first machine was an intel 386 or 486.
I am surprised how much love these machines get even today. I have seen videos of games that came out last year for them.
Have you heard of the 8-bit-guy and his game Planet X2 ?

I am surprised how much love these machines get even today. I have seen videos of games that came out last year for them. Have you heard of the 8-bit-guy and his game Planet X2 ?

Absolutely; check out these new releases as well.
http://www.homebrewlegends.com/
https://www.protovision.games/development/development.php?language=en
http://www.psytronik.net/newsite/index.php/releases
http://pondsoft.uk/

There's also quite a bit of activity on the hardware front. A German company produces new motherboards for the C64 (soon the Amiga as well) for use with the original chips; in the Netherlands a fellow has a one-man company that produces an FPGA based disk drive cartridge; another German company makes high quality new C64C cases using Commodore's original molds that they rescued from a trash heap; a guy from Denmark is getting ready to mass produce replacement keyboards; another person made a sound chip clone that he's producing to order & selling over facebook, etc. etc.

In the case of the C64, though, I think the 'retro' fascination has to do less with 'gaming' nostalgia, but rather the 'making' aspect of things. So it's more of a retro-'maker'scene, rather than a retro-gaming scene. Figuring out how to do things by pushing individual bytes around is its own reward (similarly for tinkering with the electronics). I've been experimenting with 6510 Assembly myself; while I've yet to make anything particularly interesting (still trying to wrap my head around timing & interrupts etc.), it's the little puzzles that I'm enjoying along the way. It's also worth mentioning that there exist really cool cross-development tools for the C64. They're mostly native to windoze, though some of them play nice under wine -- I'm talking about fully featured IDEs, or character & sprite editors, etc. They make asset creation & code editing a lot less painful. I don't think I'd be experimenting with Assembly if not for the ability to write it under vim (with custom syntax coloring, etc.)

... talk about hijacking a thread, though.


Last edited by walther von stolzing on 29 Jun 2018 at 7:28 am UTC

I hated Drakkhen on SNES... the first time I played it.
Once I read the manual and actually tried to understand it, I wound up loving it. I still remember the funky disco-type music that would play when you hit a warp spot on the map. I don't know if I'm up to playing it again these days, but back then, it was good. And hell, I played it on a black and white TV!

Drakkhen's sequel Dragon View was even better, though. I'd buy that if it came to Linux.