Enchanted Land by The Care Bears

Enchanted Land is a cool platformer published by Thalion in 1990 and written by immortal ST demo crew TCB or The

. It's one of my favourite Thalion games because it is SO hard at first but as you become accomplished at controling the Wizard and understanding the creatures it is a real challenge!

The ST version of the game was programmed by top TCB coder Nic Thisell (Arguably the best ST coder ever!) The ST version was a technological masterpiece and introduced Sync Scrolling. It's hard to see from these stills but there are 10's of layers of parallax scrolling, lots of transparency and cool rasters in the background) As with all ST demo's the limitation of 16 colours was blown away (for example the mountains alone are 16 colours!)

If you were/are a coder, look at the difference in the two shots. When they are showing the title which is lots of colours, in the picture above, the mountains are in 4 colour and when the credits are just 4 color or not there, like to the right, they are in 16 colours ;^>

"When Kurgan first heard of the destruction of Damiran's (The Enchanted Land - Alex) Heart of Lore, he had already felt uncomfortable. When he heard that the Evil Sorcerer Plogthor was involved in it, this hadn't quite made him feel any more comfortable. But as he stood on the virge of entering Damiran to retrieve all magic that was lost during the heart's destuction he was writhing with discomfort. "

"In Enchanted Land you become Kurgan (Someone has been watching Highlander - Alex) ; you have to negotiate 500 screens of arcade action on six levels with over 600KB of graphics that scroll perfectly smooth at 50Hz in all directions (even on the Atari ST) A task that is by no means easy. On your Way to Traskor, the capital of Damiran, you will meet every warped creature evil Plogthor can possibly send at you - who will all want to prevent you from achieving your ultimate goal: Restoring the Heart of Lore. Thalion - Well what is left to say?"

Little known fact:

Lots of the design of Enchanted Land was done by Klaus Peter Plog. That's why the evil guy in the background story was called Plogthor. And, yes, Kurgan was inspired by Highlander. This was Niclas' idea. The only idea I contributed was the name of the game: Enchanted Land is a track by German thrash metal gods, Sodom.

Thought you might like to know this...

Richard Karsmakers

There are some cool hidden bits on every level, like this cave at the start. The graphics get better and better as you progress through the levels (Which is great, as the game is so difficult getting to the next level and seeing the graphics just makes you want to get to the next!) At the end of each level is a boss, there are giant frog's, enormous goldfish and 4 others before you meet Plogthor! This is just a mini review so I will add some more screen shots of other levels at a later date! (You should try and get to them yourself!)