Sorcery Plus
Sorcery Plus Virgin Games, Amstrad CPC
I tend to think of the early years of home computer games as largely a series of “wow, look what people are doing”, a feeling for me that rises and wanes in slight degrees over time but has never really gone away throughout the entirety of video games. The difference, of course, is that for a rather short while, it was a concentrated barrage of holy fuck moments as people worked out what we could even begin doing with these damn things.
I had little awareness of Sorcery Plus for a fair while. When I could get the damn thing to load, I’d enjoyed the hell out of the Speccy version of Sorcery but it was a rather compact thing. Nice, enjoyable (I am always a sucker for flying wizards) but incredibly, incredibly slight. So it was only when my chum showed me Sorcery Plus for the CPC a while later that I truly understood why a couple of folks I knew were like “Rob, you have to see this” about it because it is fucking beautiful. I look at screenshots of it now and I’m still “this is fucking beautiful”. I am a sucker for the CPC palette anyway, but regardless… gosh.
It’s an absolutely remarkable looking thing and a great little arcade adventure to play through too, and really a lot bigger than the tiny Speccy version I was already comfortable with. It’s also one of quite a few games that makes me laugh when people present their modern homages to old video games and they all look like the NES or something, as though games that looked as good, as vibrant and distinct, as Sorcery Plus weren’t being released on the regular.
Bless. Nostalgia is a funny old thing. The modern window into retro games often bizarre. But anyway, Sorcery Plus is dead good so whatever.