Asterix and the Magic Cauldron

Audun Sorlie

14 years ago

This entry is part 5 of 14 in the series Asterix

It was only a matter of time before Asterix would appear on the most common and beloved home computer in Europe, and in fall of 1986 he finally arrived in his first official Commodore 64 outing with the open world adventure game: Asterix and The Magic Cauldron . It seemed to be in good hands as the developer, Beam Software, were certainly no strangers to making good games. The team had earlier had great success with The Way of the Exploding Fist and The Hobbit , and Asterix seemed to have “action platformer” written all over it when reading the comics or watching the movies. However, Beam thought differently and decided to take an approach similar to what Coktel Vision did on the Thomsom MO5.

The basic outline of the game is that you play as Asterix, who is in search of the seven pieces of the magic cauldron, which exploded during one of Panoramix’ experiments. The explosion sends the pieces flying all over the countryside and even beyond the borders, and so it’s up to you to make the dangerous trek with Obélix by your side. The world which you can explore is divided into 51 different screens, which are accessed from all directions. Both Asterix and Obelix are struck by hunger, which can only be satisfied by beating wild boars. Battles with Romans and boars are initiated by walking into them, which opens a small window that zooms in on the sprites and let you duke it out one on one. During fight mode you will see stamina meters for you and your opponent. If your meter goes to zero, you lose a life. If you simply stand still, the Romans will capture you and throw you in a jail cell. Also when you find items, the window will zoom in and allow you to walk over and pick it up. You begin with five lives and five boars.

When you start the game, you’ll find yourself in a rather nice looking Gaul village. Asterix and Obelix look rather well done in their sprite forms – Asterix looks a bit tall maybe, but apart from that, so far so good. Random NPCs will walk by and the game does a rather good job at making the village feel alive. At first glance, it actually looks to be a good, faithful game worthy of the Asterix name. That is, until you step out of the screen for the first time. The game draws the map up as you step out of the screen, and this is not a quick process. Depending on the amount of scenery it has to draw, this is a process that can take over 15 seconds and you will be going back and forth through areas on a regular basis. Basically, the game’s length is mostly due to the fact that you will be waiting for the screen to draw over and over and over again. Seeing that this game is all about exploration and searching, it’s quite a crippling flaw.

The game is frustrating and convoluted in various other aspects as well. Your boar meter drains at an annoying pace, and searching for boars in addition to the pieces of the cauldron makes your quest twice as long. There’s really no good reason to fight Romans as they’ll usually kick your ass, so escape is usually a better route to go down. Funnily enough, in order to escape you must slap the Roman at least once first as if Asterix is a little kid who rings the doorbell and runs away hiding in the bushes. The cauldron pieces are not easy to find, either. Today we always have walkthroughs and guides to look up online, but back then all you could do was get a pen and some paper, and draw your own map. When playing this game as kids, most people never knew where to go after the first few pieces were found because neither the game nor its manual give any hints. At one point you have to willingly surrender and mess around in jail in order to find one of the pieces. Confusing and complicated puzzles like this really don’t feel very welcome when each screen takes half a minute to draw. To make matters worse the game features one of the most sinister item placements in video game history. The seventh piece is hidden behind a piece of scenery, so when walking around you cannot see it. This would cause lots of gamers to believe the game was bugged and could not be finished. This placement of the last piece was so damaging that two different crack groups actually released their own hacked version where they placed the last piece in the middle of the screen in order to make it possible to locate it. It’s not like any of this is worth it. Once finished, the game flashes a message saying “BY TOUATIS YOU HAVE DONE IT” outside the gates of Rome. The game then restarts from the beginning seconds later.

The music is quite a piece of work. Composed by Neil Brennan of Way of the Exploding Fist and Bazooka Bill fame, it is hard to describe in words the hilarity of this soundtrack. While not horrible, the main theme is only what I can describe as a sea shanty with death metal drums. There are a few tunes in this game in addition to the swashbuckling headbanger, though most the other songs are only a few seconds long before looping over. All things considered the soundtrack might be the best part of this whole game. Even though the recipe for an Asterix game would obviously be a side scrolling beat-em-up, this game tries to do too much with very little. The size of the game is just too big for technology which can’t render a lot more than a few things at a time and the result is that you have to sit to watch the world unfold for longer than you actually play. God might have created the world in 6 days but that doesn’t mean I would bother watching the C64 take just as long.

The game was ported over to ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. There are minor differences to these versions, with the ZX Spectrum having less colors but more detail. There’s only five pieces to be found on the Spectrum, but the drawing time is even longer than the C64 version. The Amstrad CPC version has better overall graphics and color schemes but movement is much slower than both the C64 and the Spectrum. Both CPC and Spectrum lack the music that is featured on the C64. Due to Asterix not having as much commercial value in the US, the game was changed into Ardok The Barbarian for its US release. It is essentially the same game but with barbarians looking for seven pieces of a shield.