Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle was published by Sega in 1989 for the Mega Drive as an attempt to move the company's mascot of the day from the eight-bit machines onto its new console. Alex is searching for his lost father, King Thor, on a planet called Paperock, and that name gives away what the whole game rests on.

The platforming layer is conventional. You run, jump, punch blocks and enemies, and occasionally climb onto a motorbike or into a pedal-powered helicopter. The odd part is what happens at the bosses. They are not beaten in combat but at rock, paper, scissors, and losing costs you a life. Since that is by definition a guess with no information behind it, chance decides; the game softens this by letting an opponent's expression slip in a readable way now and then, but it is a thin patch over a large problem. Shopping now works the same way, so you have to gamble for the items you earned.

The second trouble is the handling. Alex is unpleasantly slippery, he slides further than you want after landing, and mid-air correction is poor. In a platformer that is harder to forgive than almost anything else, and reviewers said so at the time and have kept saying it since. It is the main reason the game is still regarded as one of the weaker entries in the series.

It does have something, though. It is colourful, it keeps up a pace, the settings change often enough that something is always happening, and there is a decent amount of it. If you know Alex from the eight-bit Segas you get a paler version of the same thing. If you do not, you get an average platformer with one very peculiar idea that makes it memorable and damages it at the same time.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with no installation.