Conquest of the Crystal Palace

Publisher: Quest
Year: 1990

What we have here is an unforgiving NES platformer with the twist that you have a pet dog that helps you by mashing into everything on the screen until it dies. OTher than that, I'm at a bit of a loss to find anything worth really talking about with respect to Conquest.

Medieval asian war-helmet? Check. Scimitar for some reason? Check. Blue? AWWWWW, CHECK.

The dog functionality is actually pretty cool-looking, but in practice, it's just sort of a shield, with the added unfortunate feature of overwhelming the NES's ability to track and render all the sprites on the screen. Like, there's this big blur of an attacking dog, and he hits some stuff, and other stuff just sort of disappears. Which is fine, I mean, maybe that's one of his other powers, in addition to mashing head-first into giant venus flytraps, he disrupts the fabric of the universe causing some enemies to vanish forever into some kind of negative zone, but mostly, I think it's just broken.

I've always liked 'Rest' to mean 'remaining'. It's a relaxing way to say, 'We couldn't afford a localizer.

There's a part where you go to the store and a Japanese woman sells you potions and shit, but I didn't really know what I was buying and anyway, I had more than enough money to buy literally everything she was selling so, you know, sort of limited the effectiveness of the scarcity notion. Also there was like a CNN of video game demon world that told news stories about things that were happening but that was just straight NES crazy so I didn't try to make any sense of it.

This just in: lion warrior dog, blob sphere flute lion.

Best Moment: I dunno. I guess when it turned out that there was a store and a tv studio in the cave?

Thing to Know: Down and B makes the dog show up, and running makes people slide off the screen and get lost.

Rating: 4/10 Who cares?