Arabian Nights

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Sinbad junior works for the fair and just Caliph as an apprentice gardener tending to his incredibly excessive palace gardens. But Sinbad falls in love with Caliph's beautiful daughter, princess Laila, who tends to stand every morning on the balcony just above one of the gardens. But things are getting extremely bad one day as the evil Vizier, in his dastardly plan to rule the kingdom, dispatches a demon from his dark castle to kidnap the princess and cast a mighty spell over the kingdom. Laila screams for help and the demon lifts off clutching the beautiful princess. Sinbad makes a desperate leap to grab the monster's claw, but is ultimately left on the balcony flat on his back. The demon disappears and Sinbad is surrounded by the Caliph's guards and hurled into prison on a charge of sorcery! Sinbad needs to escape the palace dungeons and rescue Laila from the evil Vizier. The game consists of 10 levels, each with a number of bubbling lava pits, sword-hacking and funny looking foes, moving platforms and so on. There are several puzzles to solve, which will help you progress to the next stage. Occasionally Sinbad needs to board a flying carpet, taking him to the clouds in order to bring down hot-air balloons and baddies with balloon or helicopter backpacks (!). There is also an underwater stage as well as a mine-carts race! On searching certain points, a light bulb appears above Sinbad's head, which either reveals a message or indicates a special object to be used. Bonus rooms can be entered via doors in the scenery by crouching and pressing fire. Acid pools must be avoided, rotating platforms jumped on and patrolling guards or ghosts (at the haunted pirate ship stage) are dispatched with a quick flash of Sinbad's blade. Arabian Nights is by no means a masterpiece. But it stays good action platform game that surely gives the player great fun and lots of puzzles to cope with.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Technically, Arabian Nights is not quite so impressive. It utilizes simple parallax scrolling and sometimes rather sparse backdrops. But the sprites have plenty of character and they move fast and smooth on screen. Each screen is filled with up to 64 colors and with a few nicely animated background scenes too. Each stage has its own details and scenery. The game's sound is pretty cool, offering a few nicely composed Arabian-style tunes and plenty of sampled sound effects that add a lot to the atmosphere.