can't remember name of the game: PC - Old Zelda Clone

SpinalBlood

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Hi, I need help in remembering a game title;
there was this game I played around 15 years ago which:

- it was basically a Zelda 1 (nes) clone, similar character, same horizontal/vertical movement, melee-combat with a sword or a dagger. Also the graphic was similar and primitive, and the animation were like the weapon appears and disappears with only 1 frame used
- the first level had this exactly tune as a midi file and the game folder had a "vills.mid" which was exactly like this: http://midishrine.com/midi/50706.mid

(now the points with vagues memories that might be inaccurate)

- there might have been a letter between z-x-y in the title; I'm pretty sure it was a one-word title
- the title screen was black in the background, maybe the title was red
- the title screen bgm was very weird
- the first level background was green
- I used to run this on a pentium 2 with windows 95 but I can't remember if it was native windows95 or I started it in pure dos mode
- the game was very possibly a shareware
- there was a setup function which I could assign the general midi and the bgm used for test mode was a Beethoven - Für Elise track

Thanks in advance
 

crookedmouth

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I have been attempting to find this for you and there was someone else looking for something similar. It is very hard since, as you mention, this is most likely shareware and came on a compilation disc like one of those 1001 Galaxy of Games discs or something. There were very few zelda-likes for PC. One was God of Thunder which is of course not what you are looking for.
There is an archive of shareware, cd collections and magazine cover discs, which is actually very cool because a lot of stuff is just going to be lost to time since it wasn't mainstream. Anyway here is a link if you really felt like going that deep.
http://archive.org/details/software
 

SpinalBlood

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Not sure why I wasn't able to reply immediately despite I did the login properly. I'm going to up this thread since I still have not found the title. Thanks for your reply, I have looked that website and it has plenty of isos, for now I have checked a few but no luck so far. Unfortunately the search system doesn't always work with files included
in the images (I have tested with vills.mid), also if the software is itself zipped it won't count. I'll do more research.

As I said, even if I don't remember if it actually is a dos game (but could have because windows 98 still had dos support), not only it had its own interface (not those windows-based like solitaire/winmine) but it also had the general midi support, so the game can't be too old. I would say between 93-97 (and I played it around '99)

I would also like to post another message from another user done elsewhere, even if I can't remember all these details, I can remember and confirm some, like movements and the black screen. I don't think the original guest will complain about this quote if it's for the sake of finding the title...I'm confident we are talking about the same game. As he says, it's not "God of thunder".

Now for the guest's post...


I'm looking for a DOS shareware game that I use to play. Although I played it in the late 90's, it probably was made a few years earlier than that. It felt like it was probably made by a single person. There was no music or sound, but maybe I just didn't have things configured correctly.

The gameplay was very similar to the first Zelda game. It had a 2D top-down perspective. The terrain was tile-based, but the player and monsters moved freely in real time, without being restricted to tile-based movement. The quality and style of the graphics was similar to God of Thunder, but slightly more primitive. The world was divided into small, single-screen areas, and moving to the edge of the screen would take you to the adjacent area.

I don't remember the plot. There wasn't really any plot development in the game itself, but I think there was a text file that described the backstory. You started the game next to your house in a forest or something. Returning to your house allowed you to save the game.

You played as a guy with a sword. You could move in 4 directions, and pressing a key would attack with your sword in the direction you were facing. The sword was basically a line of pixels that extended in front of you when you attacked, damaging any enemies it hit. Enemies would damage you if they touched you. You couldn't move during your attack animation, which made combat difficult.

The basic enemies walked around randomly. There were also snakes that moved in straight diagonal lines, and gray blob things that fired projectiles. In the northeast part of the world there was a dungeon that had red enemies that shot fireballs. When a monster died, it had a small chance of dropping some food that would heal you, or some gold.

There was a store where you could by a shield that blocks weak projectiles, a sword that does extra damage, or arrows, which are useless until you find the bow. Somewhere else, there was a guy that sold lock picks, which were needed to open chests in dungeons. Sometimes the lock pick would break and the chest wouldn't open, but you could buy lock picking lessons to improve your chance of opening chests.

This post is getting kind of long, but I'll mention a few other details in case it helps someone recognize this game.

In one place there was a floating eye monster that moved extremely quickly and had a ranged attack. There was a person nearby that said he would tell you how to beat the eye if you bought the registered version of the game.

You could eventually get a pick axe that could be used in certain places to open up hidden cave entrances. I think most caves contained a person that would tell you something or give you an item.

There was a cave or building or something with a woman inside, and every time you entered the building, she'd say a random sentence made up from three randomly chosen phrases.

I might be remembering this wrong, but I think that when the game first started up, there was a logo screen with a black background where a bunch of rats arranged themselves into letters spelling out the company's name.

I think the file name of the .exe file ended with a number. It might have been a version number. The game directory included about 10 or so files, including a .bat file with the same name as the .exe.
 

SpinalBlood

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Thanks, I did search a little there with no luck, but in the meanwhile I have found the game:

Zanzi: The Quest for the Mastercrown

https://dosgames.com/game/zanzi-the-quest-for-the-mastercrown/

This is the one I have played. I'm not sure if it matches all the things in the 2nd part of the posts (since it was another user), but I pretty much nailed the first part which were my rememberings.

Dosgames.com apparently added the game to its database pretty recently and made a twitter post about it, I was able to google its result, thank you! View: https://twitter.com/DosGamesCOM/status/1313154575575257090

And yes a full version is probably almost impossible, but having found the title itself is still good enough.

Solved
 
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