I remember seeing this game after receiving a load of old disks from a company called Shareware Plus. This was one of the many previews I found hiding away, classed as PD/Shareware. Now the name has been suggested to be Babylon by one crew, but actually the game never had a proper name, so Babylon is kind of a working title, as was “Paralax” which was given when Onslaught released it.
Anyway, this unnamed game is an awesome little preview of a game which owes a lot to the Mario games, Mayhem and maybe a bit of Castlevania?
The game works in similar fashion to Mario, by busting blocks with your head and squashing some characters by jumping on them. Collecting a special treasure chest will allow you to throw fire torches at your enemies, but you can also change weapons by pressing 1-3.
Starting with a cool Uridium style title screen, with large scrolling letters (Spelling “Demo”), the graphics are impressive, with some cool parallax later in the preview, and some Mayhem-esq style lightning effects. Scrolling is very smooth with an easy to control main character.
There is no sound, and only one level in this preview, and it seems that this is pretty much as far as it got. The programmer gave up on the game when trying to get interest from some of the publishers left around 1993/94 (i.e. Magna Media for Golden Disk) and wasn’t offered as much money as he had hoped.
Deekay/Crest wanted to resurrect the game in later years, but it was found that sadly all the work disks were lost. Xayne/Crest was to do the music in the new version, though the artist Daniel Kottmair suggests that Xayne had composed for the game at the start. We’re not sure if the tunes exist in HVSC, though there is nothing in the previews that snuck out.
Additionally back in 1996 – Everlasting Style also looked to pick up the game (with Deekay’s consent) and finish it off as the sequel to Misfortune. It was released on Commodore Fever Issue 3 listed as Misfortune 2, but is the same demo as which we see here.
Sadly this is all we will ever see of the game. Case closed!
Contributions: Christian Widmann, Jazzcat, Kevin Tilley, Daniel Kottmair
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Babylon.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 30/10/23 – More details added thanks to the artist.
- 30/06/14 – Credit fix thanks to Jazzcat
