Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior is an action fighting game from Palace Software that on the Amiga became famous both for its brutal combat system and for its controversial cover featuring model Maria Whittaker alongside a muscular barbarian. Playing a sword-wielding warrior, the player fights their way through a series of duels against various opponents and finally against the evil sorcerer Drax, who has kidnapped the princess. Fights take place on a single screen and rest on a combination of slashes, kicks, rolls, and blocks, with a winning strike able to literally sever the opponent's head, which became one of the game's most memorable moments.

In terms of gameplay, the game combines elements of one-on-one fighting with the need to progress through locations where traps and monsters await the player outside of classic duels against opponents. The controls are fairly sparse by today's standards, but for their time offered a surprisingly wide range of moves and emphasized correctly timed strikes. The graphics were built on finely animated characters whose muscular silhouettes and smooth movement were, in the year of release, among the best the Amiga had to offer in the action genre, and something the contemporary press repeatedly praised as a technical achievement.

The atmosphere of the fantasy world is completed by the dark environment of castles, caves, and forests, accompanied by sparse but effective music. Barbarian became one of Palace Software's most commercially successful titles, and its popularity also led to the less closely related sequel Barbarian II. The contemporary press praised especially the bloody effectiveness of the fights and the solid game mechanics, though from today's perspective the game comes across mainly as an interesting historical record of the bloodshed and marketing daring of computer games in the second half of the 1980s. As an early example of combat action with blood and severed heads, Barbarian still holds a place in discussions about the origins of controversies surrounding violence in video games.

Why play it: For its raw, bloody action and historical significance as an early example of controversial brutality in video games, Barbarian is worth trying for anyone interested in the roots of the genre.