This is a homebrew love letter to the DOS (in)famous bad game by Mastertronic, Barbarian. I had already mave a movie of that classic (see: [4742] DOS Barbarian by eien86 in 07:19.90), together with an explanation movie where I describe its hilariously bad control scheme.

This port fixes the original's Achilles heel. That is: the movement of our hero is made with with the direction keys, with buttons A to attack and B to jump. While this converts the original aberration with a more intuitive approach, it also kills its charm. Memorizing the unintuitive keys in the original game, and succeeding in doing do, felt rewarding in its own way. Here, it feels like nothing but a mediocre platformer at best.

Not only the input scheme charm is gone, but this port also removed many of the original movements, only keeping attack and forward jump. The most hilarious move: "Drop Weapon and Run in Fear" is unexplicably gone. Nevertheless, I set myself to finish this TAS in spite of the lack of charm.

The strat is simple: bunny hopping is faster than walking. It also grants invulnerability frames (much like dodging in soul-like games). The Invul frames are so complete, that only a single frame every ~100 exposes the player to harm.

The walkthrough is slightly different than the DOS port. Since the dragon's attack cannot be dodged, you need to kill it immediately. Getting hit is nevertheless still unavoidable. Then grab the shield and use it to return fire against them sorcerers.

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: Accepting.

fsvgm777: Processing. r3gamerz is handling the encodes for this one.