This is a good game to kick off a new year of ADG videos, right? ;)

Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Zeliard, an action/adventure hack and slash platforming game developed by Game Arts and originally published in 1987 on PC-88 computers in Japan, but was then ported to DOS and published in English-speaking markets by Sierra On-Line in 1990.

This game is exceptional in virtually every category given when it was originally released, but the one thing you have to be prepared for is its very high degree of difficulty. This game starts hard and stays hard across its entire length, but if you can handle it, you've got quite to experience ahead of you!

...provided you can even afford it... or don't mind pirating it... :P

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Additional Information and Corrections:

* Apologies to all the Simos and Vihinens out there as I'm almost certain I didn't pronounce either their first OR second name right. :P

* I'm pretty sure the graphic violence present in this game is roughly at the limit of what I can get away with without marking the video as mature, given that it's slightly vague and doesn't stay on-screen for more than a fraction of a second.

* The PC Speaker music in this game has been done in kind of an unusual way as it has two modes: A standard mode which sounds like typical PC Speaker music, but also a "Multi-Channel" mode which produces more of a DAC effect. When you toggle the PC Speaker music on and off you cycle which mode it's in each time you turn it back on!

* Even though the aspect ratio is technically correct for DOS computers, I have to wonder if the intended aspect ratio was more 1:1 give the game's Japanese origins, as the game looks better without aspect correction... hmm...

* One feature the DOS version has which the PC-88 version does not which I forgot to mention is health regeneration. If you stand still in the DOS version, your health VERY slowly regenerates. You can max out the game speed to get it up even faster, provided you're in no risk of being attacked, and is a bit of an oversight/cheat if you're out of healing items.

* I'm not entirely convinced the thing with going back to the very first town when you die or use a Kioku Feather is a bug... it MIGHT be copy protection... but then, Fire Hawk (aka Thexder 2) didn't have copy protection and was released roughly the same time for DOS by Sierra and every source online calls this a bug with the game. If anyone can definitively test this with real hardware and a legit copy of the game, let me know!

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