A title which we have somewhat overlooked until someone resurrected the forum post on Lemon 64…
Space Talisman (Or Labyrinth as its also known) is an early version of Hero Of The Golden Talisman, which is quite a bit different, featuring different music, screens, enemies and a rather bizzare swimming animation!
The game was first brought to light by eregil, a poster on Lemon64 who had the game on a pirated games compilation. He backed this up and showed people on the forum this very strange discovery. The game at this point was known as Labyrinth, though no titles screen to exist in the game.
It seems that an earlier version was leaked, and this was it. Potentially Shaun could have programmed this version for Mr Chip software before they fully started getting software released on the Mastertronic label. It’s possible that the game was signed up on the basis of this version, but with the agreement that it was tidied up and turned into something a bit more appealing. We’re not sure, but Andrew Fisher is now attempting to get hold of Shaun again to find out more about this obscure version.
I’ve cut and pasted some of the evaluation against HOTGT from eregil:
1) Part of the rolling credits are identical. There is the self-interview (with very minor changes), same jokes.
2) HOTGT looks very much like a further elaborated version of “Labyrinth”. Both have 5 sections, in each section you have to solve a puzzle of some sort to advance to the next. HOTGT is more complex since its first section, whereas the first section is very simple in “Labyrinth” and only in the 4th-5th one the puzzles become somewhat challenging. HOTGT has a “mini-map” of sort in the lower-left corner which is missing in “Labyrinth”.
3) “Labyrinth” actually has what seems to me to be a bug of sort, where in the 4th section you can’t get to open a gate which gives you access to the green key – therefore you can only complete the game if you saved a universal key from a previous section to use on the green gate in the 4th one.
A full evaluation can be seen via the map which eregil also produced.
Later, iAN CooG cracked the game under the title of Space Talisman, and which we have also included in the download and kept as the title for now (Unless Shaun says different).
It’s a great little finding, especially as its quite different in some ways. Check it out and do your own comparisons. In the meantime we’ll get digging and try to find out the true story behind this obscure early version…
Does Shaun remember this?… we’ll find out soon!…
Contributions: eregil, iAN CooG
