Golden Axe for DOS
Now this is where they started getting good with arcade ports to the PC. This game takes full advantage of the 256 colors that VGA could finally provide, and makes for a damned impressive arcade port, much more so graphically than the Sega Genesis version.
You pick one of three characters, a warrior, a dwarf (who is awesome) and a female warrior and go in to try to save the king and queen from Death Adder. Just don't get gangraped by the enemies because can and will surround you and beat the crap out of you. Especially those damn skeletons. You can either use the arrow keys or the number pad to control your character, the 5 key on the number pad attacks, the 0 key jumps. You can hit them both at once to do a special attack, and you can dash to get out of the way of things by hitting the direction you want to dash twice. And if you hit the attack button, they'll do a dashing attack that will knock just about any enemy on his or her ass. And in an odd decision the right Shift key will do a magic attack. Those are just the default controls, you can change them in the options menu. Even to mouse control. Which I'm almost afraid to try. :)
The music suffered a little bit in the translation, but it's still great. Though the voice and samples are horrible and sound like they're being spit out of the PC speaker. But they're close, and much preferable to the beeps and clicks of the Sound Blaster at the time and add to the overall experience of the arcade.
8/10 - Although there are much better conversions of the game located on Xbox Live Arcade and Sonic's Ulltimate Genesis Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and probably other collections too, this game has shown up everywhere. If you want a true Golden Axe experience, those are the ones to get.
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