Defender of the Crown is a 1986 Amiga strategy game by Cinemaware that was released for the CPC by Ubi Soft in 1989. It was mainly known for its nice-looking graphics. Gameplay itself is a bit thin for a strategy game but still enjoyable.
Brice Rive the coder and Laurent Boucher the graphic artist for the Amstrad CPC port came at CPCrulez french forum and told us about the development of this game and their other prods such as E.X.I.T.
- More infos there in english : http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/games/brice-rive-programmer-for-defender-of-the-crown-guest-star-at-cpcrulez/
- the CPCrulez forum topic on the matter (in french, need to be connected to the forum): http://cpcrulez.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4796
This game used a quite original copy-protection scheme implying to use a modified floppy disk drive (only some models could be moded this way) in order to format the floppy disks into 220ko per side instead of the more common 178-180ko per side. as a result those disks could be read by unmodified disk drives but crackers would have to copy the game on normal sized sides, and some specific datas would be stored in the extra sectors. So copies would use 3 sides instead on only 2 and user would have to swithc/flip disks very much more often, rendering the game experience far less enjoyable due to the many many many disk accesses such a heavy game needs.
Brice Rive went on to become copy-protection expert for Ubi Soft.
This game was ported with only a few handwritten instruction from original team, and with coder hacking his way into the Atari ST version.
Graphics were ported (hacked/ripped) directly from Atari ST, with automatic conversion then "hand-corrections" by Laurent Boucher.
Gameplay was approximately re-done by the devs with the few sparse handwritten instructions from original devs and by playing the game and trying to be as accurate as possible. As such the CPC version is quite unique and doesn't have the precise balance or gameplay the other "original" versions may have. This was often the case on Amstrad CPC ports from "American" games by european companies (or even japaneses arcade games ports by europeans on those pesky western home-computers unknown in Japan).
Video
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Links
- Defender of the Crown at CPC-Power
- Defender of the Crown at the English-language Wikipedia