#ranarama

[retrocgads]

UK 1988

[mangamers]

Do you remember the old 8-bit game Ranarama? Well... I don't blame you. I first discovered it on a magazine covermount and until I revisited it through an emulator I couldn't remember a whole lot about it. Now, there are some Commodore 64 games that I remember more vividly because those games reliably loaded for years and I was able to play them often. Ranarama was not one of those games. The only things that stuck in my mind were that you moved around a top-down dungeon like in Gauntlet and there was some kind of anagram-solving minigame where you had to swap pairs of letters to spell RANARAMA or something. Happily, the version I found online has some helpful instructions to accompany it. You play Ranarama by exploring the dungeon, moving to lower levels and defeating warlocks. Lower levels are harder and you'll need more runes and "higher" spells. As a game, it's not terrible - the icons on the floor are a nice way of streamlining interactions when you’re using a one-button joystick, and if it weren't for the difficulty of staying alive it would be a fun little dungeon crawling game. The map shows the game area in the most Rogue-y interpretation imaginable but also hints at potential paths, and stumbling into rooms full of useful icons is always nice. That being said, you eventually map out the entirety of one floor only to find something that takes you to a new floor and you have to do the whole thing all over again, so I could have kept playing this for ages. Ultimately, however, you map out each room of each floor of the entire area and then a congratulatory message appears once there aren't any more rooms to discover, or something

Like Gauntlet and Rogue, the graphics are very basic and so everything looks like a weird icon - it's hard to argue about unfair representation of men and women when you can't tell what each of the various black icons is supposed to represent. I had a look at a scan of a print advert for the game and it features a yellow and blue frog man with an elaborate hat and some kind of...robe? So that's weird, but it's not as laughable as the Maria Whittaker Barbarian cover, so we can settle for "weird" for now. I'm glad that emulation gives me the chance to revisit those games that were saved onto the most fragile tape imaginable (that's the explanation I'm running with anyway - most other games were fine so it can't have been the datasette), but you have to really like the dungeon crawling to keep plugging away at this kind of game.