Rastan

Rastan brings to the Master System a port of Taito's successful arcade game, in which a barbarian warrior reminiscent of the heroes of Robert E. Howard's stories fights his way through a fantasy land full of monsters, traps, and ancient ruins of long-forgotten civilizations. The player climbs ropes and ledges, leaps over chasms and lava pits, and dispatches monsters in melee with a sword, while collecting gold, elixirs, and better equipment along the way needed to survive the following, increasingly difficult and faster-paced levels.

The eight-bit version simplifies the graphics and the range of enemies compared to the arcade original and adjusts the game's pace for home play on a smaller screen, yet it still manages to preserve the basic feel of raw, barbarian action and the merciless difficulty for which the original was known among arcade players, where difficulty was an important part of the incentive to feed in another coin. The atmosphere is rounded out by grim, stone-hewn backdrops of castles, caves, and lava pits, as well as music underscoring the dark fantasy mood inspired by sword-and-sorcery literature and period adventure films with barbarian heroes, scored with simple but distinctive melodies accompanying the fights against giant bosses at the end of each level.

As one of the arcade ports Sega prepared for the Master System, Rastan proves that even more demanding action titles emphasizing platforming agility and combat precision could hold their own on the eight-bit console without major compromises to gameplay, pace, or the overall feel of the action. Today it's a game appreciated more by fans of the genre and old-school difficulty than by a wide audience, yet it remains an honest and reasonably faithful showcase of 1980s barbarian action that can be confidently recommended to today's players with a taste for demanding retro challenges and the older, less forgiving type of difficulty that even less patient players gradually get used to.

Why play: For fans of demanding old-school action platformers who don't mind stricter difficulty and who'll appreciate an honest transfer of 1980s barbarian arcade action.