Game 367: Alley Cat (PC)

Funny coincidence - the last commercial IBM PC game I covered was GATO.

I already covered the original Atari game, which I now and will always consider the definitive version, but truth be told, I've spent far more hours of my life playing the IBM version, which commands over 80% of the Mobygames vote tally and is probably the sole reason Alley Cat enjoys the enduring popularity needed for whale status. Ported by original author Bill Williams, we can credit this to his adept conversion skill.

Alley Cat, remarkably, ran perfectly fine on PC's for decades without having to bother with any of the remedial fixes that so many abandonware cargo cultists prescribed. Even as late as the Windows XP era, when DOS games were terribly hit or miss, Alley Cat always was well behaved. It never ran blisteringly fast like nearly all others of the CGA period did - the game uses the system clock for timing instead of being CPU-bound. It always played nice with whatever sound card you had - because everything came through the motherboard buzzer. No problems whatsoever with EMS, MSCDEX loaders, mouse compatibility, or VESA drivers - it didn't need them. Even joysticks just worked, though I found keyboard play a bit easier. No matter how bad a day my computer was having, Alley Cat proved just as reliable as Solitaire, and twice as much fun.

Those cavalier days of running DOS executables within a Windows environment are long gone now. Today, even Alley Cat needs DOSBox, and the context for its feat as a conversion no longer applies. Nearly every game works fine in DOSBox, and if you need to emulate anyway, then you might as well emulate the better version, right? Well, yes - mostly.

I thought I'd replay the PC version in DOSBox one last time, using a booter image rather than a pirate DOS conversion for a bit of extra authenticity, and deep dive into the differences.

 

Most of the differences from Atari original are cosmetic downgrades. All of the original content is present, nothing meaningfully new is added. Obviously the colors are worse, and the animation is worse with a framerate seems to run at about 20fps compared to Atari's solid 60 and a lot of little flourishes missing. The Atari's rich, albeit busy soundscape is downgraded to a lot of beeps, buzzes, and clicks.

On the gameplay front, Alley Cat plays a bit different. You'd think the choppier framerate would amplify the difficulty, but in fact it's a bit easier now. Freddy's handling feels less "heavy," and takes less time to accelerate to maximum speed, which makes the "runway" needed to reach high jump takeoff is shorter. There's also a standing high jump maneuver performed by immediately jumping after coming to a stop - this works in both versions, but the timing is much easier in the PC version, and I didn't even realize it was possible in Atari until I checked while writing this sentence. In the PC version, the condo windows stay open longer too. Because of this, I actually managed to finish a fourth loop on maximum difficulty here, which I never pulled off in the original version.

The cosmetic downgrade is apparent from the moment you see title screen, which loses the neon sign motif (what's with the cocktail glass?) for a generic scrawled-font logo. Difficulty selection, performed on Atari within the title screen, is relegated to an options sub-screen on PC. Freddy's animation loop is simplified, cutting the mischievous tail-twitching and his occasional pauses to meow at the fourth wall.

The biggest change here has to be the music, which on Atari is dominated by a slightly harsh triangle tinkle that almost cuts right through the mellow slow jazz theme, and is punctuated every few notes with Freddy's raucous mewling. On PC, you just get the melody, sped up and louder.

The total effect is that a lot of personality lost in the conversion. Atari version says you're a mangy, noisy, flea-ridden, unwanted pest who lives in the alleys behind a grimy apartment complex, and tonight you're gonna be a real nuisance. PC version says you're a cat walking on a fence.

The scene outside the condominiums is a mostly direct visual translation, but with less color. The solid magenta background suggests that this is the color of the Catalina's facade rather than a night scene like the Atari version does. A mysterious 'HM' spray-painted on the fence instead becomes KL, HL, TL, or AL to indicate your starting difficulty, but does not change when the level increases.

The audio, of course, is nerfed hard. On Atari, the scene may well be called Tin Pan Alley, with its broken down piano tune and sounds of mice squeaking and dogs barking. Freddy makes a convincing metal "clang" when leaping onto the trash cans, and a thud when he misses the clothesline and lands on the wrong side of the fence. PC just gets some rhythmic background clicks which get frantic in pace when the dog shows up, and a bunch of various screeching sounds if he gets you.

Speaking of which, the dog got a lot fatter in the PC version, and is really hard to avoid. If the feral cat knocks you off the top of a trash can, you'll probably get killed by the dog before you can find another perch.

The fishbowl room isn't changed much. No reason it should be, since it's not the real minigame.

The fishbowl itself, though - well, Bill tried his best, but the IBM PC just can't replicate the colors and sounds of the original scene. The fish are all magenta, the pearling bubbles are gone, the water sounds are out, the alarming palette-cycling electrocution animation when you touch an eel is just a ZAP. Freddy does cycle through colors as he gets close to drowning, but it's in the CGA palette, going from black, to blue, to magenta, and red. Which means Freddy's "sprite" must actually be the background layer here.

Swimming is easier than in Atari - there's a bit of momentum, but it's less weighty, and he does not bob up and down.

The birdcage room looks very similar - no bird chirping sounds any more, though. I swear the dog's spawn timer is much more random - sometimes it shows up the instant you hit the ground. The bird seems harder to catch too.

There's a new failure animation added -

 

 

In the original cheese room, mice scamper and leap around the hunk as you try to catch them. On PC they just sort of poke their heads in and out of the holes, carefully avoiding the ones you're in any position to reach. The animated numbers 1-4 that appear each time you catch a mouse, which I thought was a cute touch on Atari, are absent on PC.

 

There's only ever one spider in the spider room now, and the flower pots are wider, making it much easier to knock them down - you can hit two of them with one jump without meaning to. This is probably the easiest minigame in the PC version.

The flying milk carton is gone from the kennel and no longer refills the dog food bowls, but this minigame feels much more difficult despite that. The dogs are much lighter sleepers now, and without any pre-awakening growl to warn you when you're pushing your luck.

 

Felicia's queenly lair gets a cupid-heavy do-over, but it's just for show. Arrows spawn randomly from nowhere in particular and don't ricochet around as they did.

The animation where Felicia's brothers slink offscreen after receiving presents is cut. They just disappear now.

Reach Felicia, and the, ahem, courtship animation is much simpler than the fireworks seen on Atari.

 

But on the plus side, you get a collage of dancing kittens.

Higher difficulty = more kittens. Like in real life.

 There's a new failure animation too.

GAB rating: Good. It's a downgrade from the Atari version, but remains highly playable in its PC conversion, and the game almost certainly owes its legacy to the quality of Bill William's coding work here. Still, play the Atari version.

Game 276: Alley Cat

I've been looking forward to playing Alley Cat on its original platform. Like most of its players, I'm sure, I first played its PC CGA port, which had been programmed as a self-booting disk by the game's original creator Bill Williams, and got distributed widely as a pirated DOS conversion.

To be honest this is one of the better looking 4-color CGA games.

Nowadays, I have a better appreciation for how much more well-suited Atari and Commodore computers were for this sort of game, and with cycle-accurate emulators with modern features and conveniences, accessibility isn't a problem. At the time, though, Alley Cat was just a fun little DOS game that I could play for a good hour when I had one to kill, and it happened to work perfectly in Windows XP with no effort.

I spent a few days playing Alley Cat via Altirra. My best attempt cleared three rounds, making it to the fourth and most difficult setting but could not clear it.

 

The premise is that you, Freddy the alley cat, roam the back alley of the sleazy Catalina Condominiums, hoping to court the local white-coated queen Felicia. It's a dangerous place where vicious dogs patrol the ground level, and should you ascend to the upper levels by hopping from the trash cans to the fence and then grabbing the clothes lines, the tenants will, displeased by all the racket you're making, toss things at you through the windows. You can catch mice up here for extra points, and if you can slip through a window, you'll enter a new area and get a chance to cause some real trouble. Do well enough and Felicia might give you a shot, but first you'll have to get past her six brothers.

Alley Cat on the Atari feels a lot more difficult than I remember it. Freddy moves more fluidly, as you might expect, but his standing hops don't have a whole lot of horizontal travel, and you've got to run a fair distance before picking up enough speed for a leap to count as a running jump.

No place is safe for you either. Stay on the street too long, and a dog rushes onscreen and kills you. Stay on top of a trash can too long and a feral cat knocks you onto the street, where a dog rushes onscreen and kills you. Up on the clotheslines, the garbage thrown at you through the windows is nearly impossible to avoid if it comes out close enough, and will also kill you. And it's easy to fall from your perch thanks to a mistimed jump, or to get knocked down by the mice skittering across the clotheslines, but at least this isn't fatal.

If you can sneak into an open window, one of five minigames plays out.

The Aquarium Room is dead simple. Just get to the fishbowl, done simply by jumping from the floor to the table it rests on. A broom here, found in all of the rooms, will chase you around, shooing you out the window, and if you take too long the dog will enter, but reaching the fishbowl should be easy. Once you do, the real minigame starts.

Wait, is this fishbowl a TARDIS?

You've got to get all of the fish, don't drown, and don't touch the electric eels. This is trickier than the PC version, as here your swimming controls are heavy and imprecise. Freddy bobs slightly upwards, and fights inertia has he changes directions or stops moving. It's best to go for the easy fish first, and then wait in a safe spot while the trickier ones hopefully move away from the eels. You don't have a time limit; you just need to surface for air when Freddy starts to turn purple.

Succeed in a minigame and you get a time-based bonus, and the next window you enter will be Felicia's lair.

You've got to reach the top platform where Felicia lives, avoiding her brothers which is no simple task as they track your horizontal movements and do it fast. Contact with one knocks you down a platform, and probably right into contact with the one below. The whole time, cupids are firing arrows at you, which turn the heart platforms into broken hearts and then ricochet off the bottom and revert the broken hearts back, which very quickly screws up the platform configuration of the room. You do get a box, which can bribe one of the cats to leave you alone for awhile, but on the harder difficulties this might not be enough unless you get very lucky with the platform layout.

Thankfully, you don't lose a life if you fail, though you will be dumped back into the alley and have to complete another minigame before Felicia gives you another try. When you make it in again, you'll get an extra box to play with, up to a maximum of three. Succeed and you go back to the alley, and the difficulty level increases.

The fourth and hardest difficulty is where my game ends every time. Just getting onto the fence is nearly impossible; only one trash can is high enough to reach it, and the only way onto it is to take a running jump from the right edge of the screen. You're screwed if you're to the left of it; running all the way to the right and running back takes too long to avoid triggering the dog. I've made it into the windows here before, but have yet to finish a minigame.

In another minigame, you sneak around a room full of sleeping dogs, trying to drink their milk without waking them up. It's probably the easiest minigame, requiring more patience than skill. Back off when you hear them growl.

The broom makes things annoying, but you can distract it by leaving pawprints on the floor, which works in every other minigame as well. A carton of milk periodically refills the bowls, but once a bowl is empty, it's gone. It's best, therefore, to prioritize the bowls closest to the dogs first, allowing the farther ones to get refilled, as you can easily go for those later.

The necromancer's spiders return! The manual even refers to them as the pets of an eccentrick "Nick Cromancer." Climb the bookshelf and knock his prized flowers off the top to finish this room. Mastering the jumping trajectories and understanding where Freddy will and won't grasp the shelves is key to reaching the flowers without touching the spiders.

 

In my favorite minigame, four mice crawl around an enormous and unsanitary hunk of Swiss cheese. Catch them all to win. You can also crawl through the holes to reach tricky areas or even intercept the mice if you know where they'll take you, but the broom will once again chase you, and leaving pawprints to distract it is risky as this attracts the dog.

In my least favorite minigame, you have to knock a birdcage off a table while avoiding the broom. You've got to nudge it several times, and every time you do, you get pushed back onto the floor, where you've got to quickly jump back onto a chair and make your way back to the table while avoiding the broom. And each time there's a chance that the dog will enter.

If you're lucky, the broom might knock you right onto the table, where you can just push the cage off of it, but you'll still have to catch the bird afterward. And I just love accidentally jumping out the window while frantically jumping around the room in its pursuit.

 

GAB rating: Good

Alley Cat is just so charming, original, tightly designed, and fun that I can't not give it a harpoon. It's not an epic adventure that will take days to finish; it's a time waster that you'll play for a few minutes, but they'll always be enjoyable minutes, which is what every arcade-style game strives for, and few achieve. Williams always had a knack for creative ideas, even if they didn't always translate into a playable game, and for the first time, there's enough polish and refinement that they work.

We're done with Synapse Software, which continued to have a prolific, Atari-focused output through 1984, when they were bought out by Broderbund. Williams continued to have a career as a developer up through 1993. His next several games targeted the Amiga, and most were independent works save for Cinemaware's Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, but Alley Cat remains his most most enduring classic.

Games 274-275: Salmon Run & Necromancer

One year before writing Alley Cat, its designer Bill Williams had written two other Atari computer games. This post is about my experience playing them.

Game 274: Salmon Run

Unlike their incredibly unsuccessful attempt at creating a walled garden of internally developed and uncredited Atari 2600 cartridges, the Atari Program Exchange encouraged programmers, whether amateur or professional, to write computer software. Select titles would be listed in a quarterly catalog distributed to all registered customers, with credit, royalties, and occasionally, cash prizes given to their authors.

Williams' first game, Salmon Run, was distributed this way. Save for the oddly realistic-sounding water effects, it feels like something that might have existed on the Atari 2600.

 

As Sam the Salmon, you've returned to the rivers of your youth to embark on that one last adventure that millions of your ancestors took before; to swim upstream, leaping over waterfalls, avoiding opportunistic bears, seagulls and boys with fishing nets, and, em, find true love.

Oh, Bill.

Unlike in real life, phenoptosis doesn't set in, but instead you gain an extra life and get to have another run, only it will be more difficult, not only because the river will have additional waterfalls and hazards, but Sam isn't getting any younger. The longer you go on a single life, the weaker Sam gets - jumps become shorter, currents affect you more, and you swim slower. It's an interesting take on the limited lives mechanic that I've never really seen done before.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to beat a second loop at all, because Salmon Run is really hard. The random hazards just seem to sometimes appear in configurations that are completely impossible to avoid.

Like many of Atari's games, Salmon Run has multiple game modes, 8 to be exact, which represent 8 combinations of three binary settings:

• General waterfall concentration (Normal/High)
  
• Subsequent rounds strengthen the current (Off/On)
  
• Subsequent rounds add more waterfalls (2/4)
  

 

Mode 8 has all of these enabled, and it was here that I achieved my highest score.

 

GAB rating: Bad. I feel bad about condemning this earnest, well-meaning, and novel effort, and almost think I must be missing something, but Salmon Run just feels frustrating and annoying to play. It handles weirdly, collision detection seems glitchy, and I just can't see a viable strategy for success when you're at the mercy of randomly spawning predators in places where you can't avoid them.

Game 275: Necromancer

Williams' second game was his first with Synapse Software, and is a bit more substantial than Salmon Run. And a lot more weird.

The first and most striking thing about Necromancer is its atmosphere. This game is dark, grim, and oppressive! Cliche nowadays, but there's a style and sincerity that I just don't get from modern corporate-created grimdark settings. Williams' low resolution artwork feels more surreal rather than abstract, partly due to skillful use of palette cycling tricks, but also, I think, because Atari games aren't usually this black. Let's also not fail to mention the title screen theme, a simple but haunting melody, made at a time when most computer games didn't have any music at all.

You play a druid, and must defeat a necromancer and his army of spiders with your magic powers and army of trees, over the course of three stages, where your performance in one affects conditions of the next.

The first stage is about raising your trees while orcs threaten to cut them down.

Your joystick controls a wisp, and it's difficult to move it around precisely. Pressing the button plants a seed, which will grow into a tree, sometimes very quickly, sometimes agonizingly slowly, but it's vulnerable until fully grown. The wisp can chase away the orcs or destroy them, at the cost of some strength, and can retrieve more seeds from the occasional dryad. Spiders will poison your trees, causing them to start screaming, and will die soon unless you heal them with your wisp. As you plant more trees, the "level" increases, and the tempo of the action with it, up to a maximum level of 5. Once your energy runs out, which is reduced by killing orcs or getting hit by a spider, you gain 200 strength for each level attained, and take your trees with you to the next level.

I found a pretty good strategy for ensuring that you reach level 5.

Plant your first four trees in the corners, one at a time while the level is still low, and watch them like a hawk to make sure each one of them grows. Then go nuts on the top and bottom rows - the corner trees will protect them. You've still got to watch for spiders, and they can infect multiple trees in one pass, but curing your sick trees is a lot easier when they're all standing in a row on an edge of the screen.

Stage 2 is the catacombs, and here, things fall apart. The goal is to crush as many sacs as possible with your trees, which is done with a truly bizarre control scheme and needlessly convoluted rules.

To command a tree, first move the wisp to your tree, and then your joystick moves the tree, but the control scheme is an uncomfortable scheme where you tap a direction to start moving, and tap up or down to stop moving (unless you're by a ladder), like keyboard controls in an Apple II game - totally unnecessary as these are joystick controls. The druid may be moved by holding the joystick button, and his direction is changed by tapping a direction while still holding it, which is also pretty confusing. Question mark icons may be collected to extend ladders, but you must be careful to avoid the grasping hands - if they get your druid it will cost 300 strength, and you just can't afford that.

To crush a spider sac, move a tree above it and press the button to plant it. Eventually roots will take hold, the ground will crumble, and the tree will fall. Then you may burn the tree with your wisp, reclaiming it.

There's a lot of luck involved here, because the sacs will hatch eventually, and in a random order, with random timing. A sac will start glowing when it's about to hatch, but sometimes it's too far away to do anything about it. The trees move very slowly, and the grasping hands slow you down even more. The amount of time it takes to hatch is random, the amount of time it takes a tree to take root is random, and sometimes a spider just hatches before you can do anything, even if you acted immediately.

That's not the end of the world on level 1, where everything moves slowly and you can kill the spider with your wisp, gaining 100 strength as a reward, but around level 3 they start moving so ridiculously fast and deftly avoid your wisp that they'll wreck havoc. If you planted a tree above, it will certainly destroy the tree. If you wrote that sac off as a lost cause and tried planting trees far away, and they didn't take root fast enough, the spider will likely destroy them. It might even get into your tree reserve and destroy everything. And ultimately, unless you get extremely lucky, it will touch you, costing you 100 strength and ensuring you'll see it again in the next stage.

What was I even supposed to do?

Even after learning the controls and mechanics, I found this stage random, chaotic, and unfair, and frequently did things I hadn't intended thanks to the weird controls. Often I'd plant a tree, only for this to cause the druid to walk right into a hand, as the button for planting trees and moving is the same.

Full disclosure - I had to horrifically abuse save states to pass this stage with a minimum of eggs left uncrushed, partly due to the weird controls, but mostly due to the extreme amount of luck manipulation involved. And even then it wasn't perfect by any means.

If you just want to pass the stage, you can do this fairly easily by ignoring the eggs and just rushing to the bottom, being extremely careful to avoid the hands. Better yet, on levels 1 & 2, wait for the eggs to hatch, and kill the spiders with your wisp until your strength maxes out at 2000. This, I can do without save states, but you'll be screwed on the next stage. Or at least that's what the manual says.

Descend past level 5, and you arrive at the graveyard, and showdown with the necromancer himself.

 

Topple the headstones, avoid the spiders, and shoot the necromancer for bonus strength. The wisp is incredibly hard to control here! Sometimes it kills spiders, sometimes it doesn't, but it hardly matters as the necromancer will just regenerate any spiders that you do kill. The controls still use the backwards scheme of controlling the wisp when the button is released and moving the druid by holding it.

The manual says that the more sacs you leave uncrushed (or hatched) in the previous level, the more spiders you have to deal with here. In truth, it seemed like even when I manipulated luck to get most of them, his army was still overwhelming and unmanageable.

There are five levels, and it is critical that you "farm" the necromancer for strength during levels 1&2 where it's still possible to do this faster than the spiders can drain your strength. Do not finish these levels with less than the maximum of 2000 or you'll be very, very dead during the next three. Even if you do, you're probably still going to die.

Once again, I had to use save states to ensure not too much life was lost on each subsequent level. You can't control where the spiders spawn, they move faster than you and unpredictably, it hardly seems worth the trouble to try to kill him, and the necromancer himself moves too quickly to farm for more life. You can easily lose 500 strength in a fraction of a second. It all feels very luck-based, and almost hilariously skewed against your favor. And that's if you can even decipher all the chaos going on the screen.

Beat level 5 and the necromancer asplodes and fills the screen with rainbows.

GAB rating: Bad. Once again, I feel awful about condemning this. It's an original, authorial title, with strong art direction and so many novel ideas. We've seen minigame collections before, where each stage is a different arcade game knockoff, but not only does every Necromancer stage seem like something new, but there's actual gameplay cohesion, and not just a bunch of unrelated minigames. You plant trees in stage 1 so that you can squash spider nests in level 2, so that you can deal with fewer of them in level 3.

But obtuse controls, weird mechanics, and grossly unfair gameplay ruin the experience. I had no fun playing Necromancer during my attempts to do it fairly, and no fun savescumming during stages 2 & 3 every few seconds to ensure the game would be beatable.

Thankfully, I already know the next game is good. Really good.

Game 273: Shamus

Our next whale, Alley Cat, is one of the best known computer games of the early 80's, though perhaps better known for its 1984 PC port than the Atari original. That's the version I played in the early 2000's, thanks to its wide distribution as freeware and surprisingly good compatibility with Windows XP era systems.

Its designer, Bill Williams, created two games prior in 1982, both for Atari computers; Salmon Run through the Atari Program Exchange, and Necromancer through Synapse Software, who would later publish Alley Cat and Commodore ports of both earlier titles.

Synapse Software was, in its heyday of 1981 to 1984, the largest third party publisher of Atari computer software, originally focusing on databases, but soon expanded into computer games.

They published two games in 1981. One, Dodge Racer, is a clone of Sega's Head-On, and of no interest to me. The other, Protector, seems like a blend of Defender and Scramble, and was originally published by Crystalware, but republished by Synapse after a bit of playtesting, debugging, and polish. This holds a bit more interest to me, but the link to Alley Cat seems too tenuous to require inclusion in a retrospective leading up to it.

Synapse released several games in 1982, and the most well known of them appears to be Shamus, by a considerable margin. This game, which contains little sleuthing but plenty of shooting and is very obviously inspired by Beserk, is the title I've selected to play as an introduction to the company.

 

Just like in Berzerk, you run around a maze full of robots who are trying to kill you. The walls are deadly to touch, you attack in eight directions (by throwing "electro-shivs"), robots have a tendency to shoot or crash into each other, and if you tarry too long, an invulnerable, wall-passing opponent spawns and chases you, though unlike Evil Otto he can be stunned.

Where it differs, though, is that Shamus' maze is hand designed and has an absolute endpoint. Colored keys and locks mean a lot of backtracking, and the robots, which come in five different varieties, respawn whenever you enter a room. With 128 rooms spread over four color-coded zones, each one designating a higher difficulty level than the previous, with faster, more aggressive robots, a full playthrough takes over half an hour. It took me several nights to beat Shamus, but each time I made it farther and farther in, filling out more of my map. At least that was until I reached the Red Zone, where things were frantic, and here I made a single save state about halfway through. It was just enough to reach the lair of the villainous Shadow and toss an electro-shiv through his yellow keister.

The game then restarts on a higher difficulty, but I'm cool. Novice mode was hard enough.

Some observations:

• The maps are orthogonal but non-Euclidean. Going down, left, right, and up does not guarantee you will end up in the same place you started. Trizbort was therefore ideal for mapping things out.
• Unfortunately, there's no pause button from what I can tell. Making a map while playing on real hardware must be incredibly annoying! Even if you kill everything else in the room, The Shadow will eventually enter and chase you around, and in the later zones he doesn't take long at all.
• Robots are more random than in Berzerk, but less suicidal. Tricking them into colliding with each other, or shooting each other, or walking into walls is very difficult. However, killing one robot often takes out another one or two in proximity to its explosion.
  
• Once you kill the last robot in the room, Shamus's walking speed increases tremendously. This is very handy for traversing empty corridors quickly, but the sudden acceleration got me killed by accidentally walking into walls more often than I'd have liked.
• Shamus is pretty generous with extra lives, which exist as pickups that look like potions, and are granted after collecting enough points, and sometimes randomly when collecting mystery tokens. But you'll need them.
• Robot spawns are semi-random, but each room is fairly consistent in how heavily populated it is. 
• Sometimes robots spawn very close to where you enter and you just have to retreat because there's no chance of dodging their fire. Sometimes they kill you before you even get a chance to retreat.
  
• When The Shadow enters a room, any collectibles will vanish until you exit the room and return. This is especially annoying when the room contains a key or keyhole; those will also vanish until you exit and return, and you need them to beat the game. Sometimes you just can't rush your way through a heavily defended room, and you run out of time.
• The rooms where you find the keys are semi-random. It seems like for each key, there's between 1 and 3 rooms where it might be found. The potential key rooms that don't contain keys will have extra lives instead.
  

 

GAB rating: Good. It's a bit too difficult and too long, but Shamus is overall a good take on the Berserk formula, and feels better suited to the home experience with the addition of a structured game world and end goal. It's crying for a pause button though - thank heaven for emulation!

My Trizbort map: