Super Cauldron

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You play the role of Zmira (a brave young witch) must travel across three different worlds in the kingdom of Cauldron. Your quest is to free people that have been enslaved and captured by the Evil Sorcerer, search and acquire a number of lost magical powers and spells and, finally, destroy the Evil Sorcerer inside his own haunted castle. There are 12 spells to collect and you will need all of them in order to complete the game. The spells include fireballs, lightning and bombs, while others contain some weird -yet valuable- stuff like magical staircases, bridges etc. Equipped with magical stones as your basic weapon, you will fight your way through a variety of levels, each set in a fantasy world with appropriately scary monsters (like vampire bats, etc.) and creepy atmosphere. What differentiates Super Cauldron from the other Titus games is the inventive level design and cool power-up items. For example, you can pick up a broom to fly around the screen, although it may have limited use. There are many items to find and secret areas to discover. Super Cauldron has plenty of fun quirks and you surely need some more time spent to master it since there are times that it gets really frustrating.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The visuals are quite nice and each stage is very colorful and detailed, offering up to 32 colors on screen on the Amiga version (while comparably the ST version has 16 colors). When I first played this game on the Amiga, I was absolutely amazed by the graphics (especially by the detailed backgrounds and sprites design). The frame-rate on the Amiga is flawless (far better compared to the ST) and the sprites move pretty fast and smooth. Also, the Amiga version uses a few more details at the foreground (these details are missing on the ST) and sports parallax scrolling as well. The game's sound leaves a little to desire. The tune is standard and the sound effects are not bad (most of them are sampled). Unfortunately (and this is strange for the Amiga) you can only choose either music or sound effects during gameplay. Of note: both intro and in-game music are very decent and amusing.