Blades Of Vengeance is a side scrolling slash 'em up game developed by Beam Software and published by EA in 1993, for the Sega Megadrive console.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The game takes place in a fantasy world ruled by an evil villain called Dark Lady. Your main quest is to fight your way through killing Dark Lady's armies and finally confront her. There are 3 different characters to choose: The Warrior, the Huntress and the Magician. Each hero possesses different powers and uses different weapons. For example, the Warrior is much stronger and can endure more hits and strike the enemies harder, the Huntress is much faster and more agile while the Magician can cast various Spells (quite Golden Axe-ish huh?). So, all you need is to grab your joypad, choose your warrior and start to slash the foes up until you finally find the Lady! the game unfortunately suffers from an oddly extreme level of difficulty, a factor that may seem very frustrating to many gamers and Megadrive owners.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics are great (the color palette used might seem a bit "dark") and there is also some parallax scrolling involved. Blades of Vengeance features some nice sound FX plus a cool music score that adds to the atmosphere.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
Megadrive (EU) / Genesis (Jap)
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz in PAL, 7.67 MHz in NTSC / Secondary Zilog Z80 at 3.55 MHz in PAL, 3.58 MHz in NTSC MEMORY: Main: 64Kb RAM + 8Kb / Video RAM: 64Kb / Audio RAM 8Kb GRAPHICS: VDP Chip: 256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240 / 512 colors (1536 using shadow-highlight mode),64 x 9-bit words of color RAM, 4 lines of 15 colors plus transparent, allowing 61 on-screen colors / Sprites: Up to 64 on-screen, 16/20 per line, 256/320 pixels per line, per-sprite priority / Interlace Mode 1 (no increase in resolution and Mode 2 (2x vertical resolution) SOUND: Main: Yamaha YM2612 @ 7,16MHz with six FM channels, four operators each / Secondary: TI SN76489 with 4-channel PSG + 3 Sq Wave channels.