For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing the old classic Mac game Dark Castle on a Mac Plus emulator. It’s a game I remember fondly from when I was a kid, and playing it again has been a lot of fun. I’m on vacation in St. Louis this week–which would explain why I wasn’t posting much, except that I never post much–and I was hoping to beat the game before I got back. I think I just did. I’m not sure, though. I toppled the Black Knight’s throne. I wasn’t expecting an intricate victory sequence, but I seem to simply have been tossed into the dungeon, with my special powers reset and the difficulty level of the game turned up a notch (there are three). Do I have to beat the game on Advanced to see a real ending, or even then do I win only the opportunity to play it again?

It’s frustrating, since there isn’t much information about the game from 1986 online. I did find one walkthrough of the PC version of the game–the Mac version is slightly different but close enough to be helpful–but the author never finished the game.

Maybe I’ll see if I can’t beat it again and see if I missed something. One interesting aspect of Dark Castle is that it’s very much a practice-makes-perfect sort of game. Each level has a pattern, and once you’ve learned the pattern, the level becomes fairly easy to beat each time. Most levels, from the first to the last, started out being very daunting, but once I successfully got through them once, they became routine. So hopefully it won’t be too hard to beat the Black Knight again, and see if the same thing happens.

Or maybe I’ll just move on to Beyond Dark Castle.