Blade Lords The Game (released in 1994) Blade Lords is a one or two-player platform game in the tradition of Bubble Bobble ... but far more violent. 60 stages await the player, and you might defeat the evil wizard Ayraa. Cute enemies just ask to be destroyed, and bonusses are everywhere for the taking. Oh, and the other player would love to be stunned... The idea for Blade Lords was created after we'd been playing Taito's classic Bubble Bobble. That game is great fun, but there's one major drawback: You keep thinking that you'd like to annoy the other player more. This resulted in some first designs, and mixing some elements from Konami's King's Valley like the 'throw your sword and retrieve it another time' turned out to produce a very playable game. Unlike the two classics, I included an inertia control - i.e. the character starts to walk slowly and then speeds up. This way you could pull some amazing tricks once you'd mastered this control method. There's now a patch for world 2-9 to download, which makes this extremely hard level a lot easier. At first there were multiple swords, and each player would be able to 'hold' any number between zero and five swords in his hands, but not more. Later this option was removed because it turned out to be more fun when you had only one sword. The cost of throwing that sword was higher - you are left unarmed for a short time after throwing, until you retrieve your sword. Actually, this option is still in the game and can be accessed by means of the hidden cheat menu! Try it sometime when playing with a friend: mega massacre! There's another strange option in Blade Lords: You can 'cling' to the ceiling by sticking your sword in it and hanging on! It gets better still: You can then summersault to get on top of the platform you were hanging under. That's all great fun, especially with two players. Blade Lords Promo/Menu I was asked to make one of the menu's for a Sunrise Picturedisk (number eleven or twelve, if I'm not mistaken) and I chose to create one around the game I was working on at the time: Blade Lords. What was asked was a game combined with a selector, in which you could choose which program on the disk you wanted to run. You could choose by pressing the relevant number, or by playing the game to get at the desired option. Of course there are hidden things in the promo... The picturedisk that was published just before this one had a menu made by Compjoetania, and was a cut-down version of their Pixess. You could find a MAP in this game. A map which looked pretty crap. So I decided that the Blade Lords Menu should also have a map. Which, of course, is completely unneccesary. But there you go. Play the menu and press [F2] and this map appears. Read the small fonts... Actually, the map that you can see is a modified version of the Map that Compjoetania used; I ripped it. *grin* There are more hidden things in the demo though. It has a tendency to misspel certain words that you can put in the basic-loader... but I won't reveal those. Where can you get this promo? Well, find the relevant Picturedisk, or wait for me to put it online. Duh.