[ZX Spectrum, Special Soft?]
In Reyes y Castillos [Kings & Castles], two castles within canon range of each other are fighting it until only one castle stands, or alternatively until both castles stand but they share the same flag!
The starting situation is randomly generated, though both sides always start with exactly 500 guns [cañones] and both sides have the same amount of cash
The available options are:
- Use the guns – basically a regular attack with the guns
- Advance – an attack with the warriors,
- Catapult – a bit out of place given you have guns, and indeed if you try to use it the game will mock you because you don’t have any. However, in exceptional circumstances you can receive one, you can use it for high-risk-low reward options,
- Recruit civilians – This allows you to turn civilians into soldiers, at no cost (but with a chance to fail),
- Buy guns, which is about as useless as recruiting civilians as your number of guns has no impact on their damage,
- Infiltrate – this is sending a spy to assassinate directly the rival king, but of course it almost never works.
So far, it looks like a tactical game with few options, one where both sides basically exchange blows until a victor is determined:
But that’s without taking into account the absolutely broken random events, for instance my papá sending me eleven thousand men, almost 500 guns, a repair team, some civilians and, yes, a catapult in support!
I try to use the catapult, but all I manage to do is damage my own castle with it! Eventually, the computador destroys it with its guns.
Meanwhile, both sides continue to receive occasional reinforcements, though nothing on the scale of what papá sent.
At some point, I feel the enemy castle is about to crumble, so I focus fire on it. Alas, it’s the computer’s turn to receive an unexpected inheritance.
I had been trying to chew through the walls of the enemy castle since the beginning, and now my opponent receives 20 000 extra health points? Frustrating. My opponent is now stronger than it started.
Desperate and out of patience, I try an Ave Maria paso and send spies to murder the enemy king. My spy has to kill 3 bodyguards in a row.
Hey! What do you know! It worked, ending the game!
I am offered to play another session to improve my rank above my current one.
I don’t, thank you very much.
Ratings & Review
Reyes y Castillos [Kings and Castles], author unknown, attributed to Special Soft [Argentina?],
First release: 1984 according to the loading screen,
Genre: Allocation game
Average duration of a campaign : 5 to 15 minutes
Total time played : 2.5 hours
Complexity: Low (1/5)
Final Rating: Totally obsolete
Context – Reyes y Castillos is a mysterious game, as it was uploaded on SpectrumComputing without any documentation or manual. The game itself only provides four pieces of information on its origin:
- It uses a lot of lunfardo, the argot of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. If you usually read Spanish, it’s all those words you could not understand,
- Its “copyright” is from 1984,
- It mentions a company called Special Soft, with however the mention “readap.” (readapted?). SpectrumComputing says Special Soft it is a Spanish company, but I believe it is their default attribution for games in Spanish and I could not find any mention of a Spanish company called Special Soft. However, I did find an Argentinian Special Soft in the 80s, publishing ads from the first issue of K64 in July 1985, which sold computers and their accessories – and of course replicated games.
- Hidden inside the code, one can find this mention: “Cracked by Ariel Genis y Jorge Bene, Uruguay, 1987 Trackabyte Soft“. I contacted Ariel Genis who told me he was cracking everything that was provided to him, and neither him nor Jorge Bene remember anything about this game in particular. However, he also added that it was possible that they would change the strings of the games they cracked, so even the language used in Reyes y Castillos isn’t an indication. For all we know, it could be an English game that was translated in Uruguay.
So where does it come from? Well, this little mystery is the reason for my articles on Argentina and Uruguay. The most likely hypothesis is that it was a game done for fun or profit in Argentina on a Spectrum or more likely on a popular Argentinian clone like the CZ1500, presumably by someone working for or at least in contact with Special Soft. The two reasons I believe it is more likely to be from Argentina rather than Uruguay are the existence of this Special Soft company in Buenos Aires and the existence of a specific joke when you miss with the catapult: “Erraste el disparo!, sos más malo que Martínez de Hoz como economista!” ; Martinez de Hoz being an Argentinian minister it would be weird to single him out if the game was not made in Argentina. I welcome anyone finding wrinkles with my theory.
Traits – There isn’t a lot to say here, the game is barely a wargame and could have been a BRIEF if i didn’t consider my effort on the Argentina warranted a full coverage of the country’s (?) first game here.
Even NOT taking into account the randomness of the game, Reyes y Castillos lacks the features to pilot your performance:
- you have cash, but the only thing you can spend it on is guns, which in my experience is useless (the amount of damage does not seem correlated to the number of guns you have, and I came close to 0 guns only once). You can’t buy spies, soldiers or repair your castles; surprisingly you can dismiss soldiers to anticipate for paydays,
- you have civilians, but the only thing you can do with them is convert them into soldiers at no cost,
- you can’t do anything against spies, they’re a random “roll a lottery to see if you win or not” button,
Then, there is the extreme randomness of the game, in which attacks are hit or miss with an insane standard deviation on the results (some of them hurting you) – and of course the gamebreaking events. I mentioned the donations from papá, but what about the floods [hunde] and the plagues [peste]? Well, they can break the game almost as much:
Finally, the game has some pretty acceptable music for the era… that plays every action you do, making the game longer to play than it should. Add a few bugs here and there and you have an experience that’s both pointless and frustrating.
Did I make interesting decisions? No The only somewhat relevant decision in the game is between “attack with guns/soldiers to drain enemy resources” and “try to end it now with a spy”. Apart from that, there aren’t enough material differences between attacking with men and attacking with guns to really matter.
Final rating: Totally obsolete. Adding a real purpose to the money (buy troops/repair walls), making the number of guns matter and toning down the RNG massively could have made this a somewhat acceptable game, maybe.
Ranking at the time of review: 162/171. It’s pointless, and due to all the music it’s not even as short as it could be.
Be First to Comment