Posted January 21, 2021
high rated
When I say that Moonstone defined the person I am today it is not an exaggeration, because of this game and Shadow of the Beast I was motivated to pursue a career in art and game development which has brought me a lot of happiness through my life.
My brother and I love this game, he even gifted me an original near mint Amiga copy which I proudly display in my bookcase which I hope to get Rob Anderson sign it someday.
Even though I have played the Amiga emulated version to the death, I have bought this game out of support and respect for the author since he is still the owner of it, and finished it rather quickly and yes I still love it each time I reply it for all it’s faults and bugs which by the way I have not encountered any yet within this version.
In fact there was a notorious exploit which I doubt anyone had ever noticed back on the amiga regarding the level cap of 150 gold which could be bypassed by gambling and winning in the tavern and once the 150 limit was passed, you could accumulate as much as you wanted (never tried it going past 900 coins). The dragon can sadly still be stunlocked into oblivion making it the easiest character to kill in the game.
Anyhow I want to say this version is about 90% identical to the Amiga. The main point of difference I could see are the sound effects being a bit of a downgrade (the dragon wound sound should become a meme), the colour changing over a knight as they are about to die pulsates slower (kinda nice), and finally the framerate of many things is a lot faster which makes some things better and other worse.
Controls are weird and tricky, you use the arrow keys and enter for player 1 and WAXD +L SHIFT for player 2 (borderline impossible to control because of the X). I suggest using any of the free programs which allows you to map any of your gamepad keys to a keyboard stroke, that way you may play as it was meant to be.
While I do hope that Rob will someday bring us something new with the same spirit of the original Moonstone, if you are interested I have been working on 2 Moonstone inspired games, the first you can find here, it is about 10+ years old and discontinued (we did not have enough experience). The most recent and still very active but unfortunately I cannot post youtube links here so if you would like to see, just ask or search on youtube for "Pixel Art Project Update #1"
My brother and I love this game, he even gifted me an original near mint Amiga copy which I proudly display in my bookcase which I hope to get Rob Anderson sign it someday.
Even though I have played the Amiga emulated version to the death, I have bought this game out of support and respect for the author since he is still the owner of it, and finished it rather quickly and yes I still love it each time I reply it for all it’s faults and bugs which by the way I have not encountered any yet within this version.
In fact there was a notorious exploit which I doubt anyone had ever noticed back on the amiga regarding the level cap of 150 gold which could be bypassed by gambling and winning in the tavern and once the 150 limit was passed, you could accumulate as much as you wanted (never tried it going past 900 coins). The dragon can sadly still be stunlocked into oblivion making it the easiest character to kill in the game.
Anyhow I want to say this version is about 90% identical to the Amiga. The main point of difference I could see are the sound effects being a bit of a downgrade (the dragon wound sound should become a meme), the colour changing over a knight as they are about to die pulsates slower (kinda nice), and finally the framerate of many things is a lot faster which makes some things better and other worse.
Controls are weird and tricky, you use the arrow keys and enter for player 1 and WAXD +L SHIFT for player 2 (borderline impossible to control because of the X). I suggest using any of the free programs which allows you to map any of your gamepad keys to a keyboard stroke, that way you may play as it was meant to be.
While I do hope that Rob will someday bring us something new with the same spirit of the original Moonstone, if you are interested I have been working on 2 Moonstone inspired games, the first you can find here, it is about 10+ years old and discontinued (we did not have enough experience). The most recent and still very active but unfortunately I cannot post youtube links here so if you would like to see, just ask or search on youtube for "Pixel Art Project Update #1"
Post edited January 21, 2021 by Artcakes
