Released earlier this month, Sword of Fargoal for the iPod Touch and iPhone ("iTouch") has had no shortage of pre-release buzz and anticipation, and, once gamers got their hands on the game, nearly universal praise. Well, it looks like now I have to heap on some more.
The original commercial versions of Sword of Fargoal, released for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 in the early 1980s (review here), came towards the end of the former system's short, but successful commercial lifespan, and early on in the latter system's long and successful commercial lifespan. While generally considered a critical and commercial success (with the caveat that it was also successfully pirated), its release timing in each case caused it to have a bit more mainstream obscurity than it likely would have had otherwise. Nevertheless, the strength of the game - which is essentially a simplified, randomized dungeon crawl, very much in the tradition of Rogue (though with more real-time elements) - allowed it to have enough impact in the minds of gamers to be mentioned often on "best of" lists and receive several unofficial conversions and updates over the years, even making it as one of the games on the popular Commodore 30-in-1 from a few years back. This brings us to the latest release of the game, and the first official new commercial release since the Commodore 64 version. Matt Barton had the pleasure of speaking with original author Jeff McCord not too long ago, and it was McCord and the rest of the Fargoal LLC team who were kind enough to send me a review code for this version for my iPhone 3G.
Upon starting the game, you're greeted with an all too uncommon occurrence in iTouch games--an opening cinematic. Normally, this would be a mere distraction to quickly skip past, but in this case - no doubt due to the skills of Emmy-winning animator, Charlie Canfield - it's a pleasure to behold and a great scene setter for the stylized visuals of the game within. This quality is carried through to the occasional in-game cut scenes. While this is nothing to get the game over all by itself, this is but the first of many examples of the type of TLC that went into this game's creation. Not to be outdone, British composer Daniel Pemberton created a musical score to be reckoned with. Combined with the mix of classic in-game sound effects, aurally the game does not disappoint.