Dark Castle PC[[Image: ]]
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| Developer(s) | Original Silicon Beach Software Port Three-Sixty Pacific, inc. |
| Release date(s) | 1987 (PC) |
| Genre(s) | Platform game |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS |
- This article mainly refers to the PC version of Dark Castle, and the differences between it and other versions, for more general Dark Castle info visit Dark Castle
After winning many awards, and being a top seller on the Mac, Three-Sixty ported Dark Castle to many systems, including the PC, through MS-DOS.
Graphics[]
The graphics for Dark Castle on the Mac where highly praised for the clearness, and high resolution.
Clearly porting Dark Castle to the PC was going to be an issue to the lower resolution. The graphics where downgraded from the resolution 512x342, to 320x240. Which made lots of lines disappear and the graphics look somewhat washed out and blocky, losing the clear and high resolution graphics the Mac version was praised so much for in its day.
One thing PCs had over Macs at the time was color; 4bit color, which were used in this game to make up for such downgraded graphics. Unfortunately, the colors seem really out of place and ruin the graphics even more on some levels.
Sounds[]
The sounds on the Mac version of Dark Castle were also praised. While the Macs of the time had better sound hardware, the PCs were stuck with inferior sounds from the PC Speaker due to no soundcards back then.
This meant the game had a lot of its sounds cut, and the remaining ones were distorted, loud and sounded awful.
Controls[]
For some reason, Three-Sixty Pacific decided to change the controls from the standard to such:
- D - Duck
- A - Action
- Arrow Keys - Movement
- Spacebar - Jump
- 1-8 - Different arm positions for aiming.
- -/+/Mouse - Aiming
- Enter/click mouse - Throw rock
Reception[]
The reception of the PC version was luke warm, with critics panning the bad controls and messy graphics.
The general consensus is that the game is highly inferior to the Mac version, in graphics, sound and gameplay.
This is considered to be the third worst port of Dark Castle, all the way up until the Genesis/Megadrive and the CD-i ports took its place.
Gallery[]
Also See[]
- Dark Castle - For more general info.