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 ST version visuals are decent and it is obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been taken over them. Apart from a few glitches due to its hardware limitations such as the limited 16 colors on screen, the ST game is pretty nice. It seems to push the limits of the ST a bit because the machine seems to have trouble coping up with all the moving objects, so the frame-rate drops significantly at times. Also, the game on the ST runs in flip-screen mode, which (as in most cases with such games) makes the gameplay more difficult. It looks like this version was not coded well, because we surely have seen the ST performing some amazing things in graphics and surely a game such as this should not push the computer its limits. Note that a few details at the foreground are missing compared to the Amiga version which uses parallax scrolling. Also, the Amiga version offers double the colors on screen. The introductory tune is fine but the in-game soundtrack is far from thrilling and the SFX are very few and badly done.