The Lost Vikings

So say you have some vikings, one that can run real fast, one that is good with a sword and a bow, and one that’s tough and has a shield. Let’s then suppose that said vikings get kidnapped by aliens for some kind of experiment or other. Then we can further suppose that the experimentees get rowdy, like vikings occasionally do, and begin to plot their escape. Once we have all of that down we have a game called The Lost Vikings.

So you have to take all three of your viking buddies through the various rooms in the spaceship, all filled with lots of forms of insta-death, and use their unique abilities to proceed. You can and must switch between the three guys at will to try and maneuver your way around the dangers. Olaf, the one with the shield, can block things or use his shield as a stepping stone for the other guys. Erik, the skinny one, can run real fast, jump real far, and crash headlong into things and break them. And Baleog, the other one, can pretty much just run around and kill things. Of course, the real fun is trying to use their abilities in unorthodox ways, which is actually required to make progress in this brain-bending game.

I thought that this game looked pretty good when I saw it in the game magazines at the time. But what I guess I didn’t know was that you have to control all three of the boogers at roughly the same time and all three of them must survive every level. Which wouldn’t be too bad, except that if you make a misstep (i.e. get one of the vikings killed off in some hilariously tragic fashion) then the level becomes unsolvable. You do get unlimited continues to mitigate this somewhat, and I needed every one of them.

Unfortunately, I only had this game for one evening on a rental, which is not nearly enough time to get intimately familiar with the sort of arcane dance routine you have to do precisely in each level to win. I only managed to get through the first few stages before I gave in. And by ‘gave in’ I mean ‘took the game back to the rental store’.

Some time not too long ago, Blizzard rereleased this game for the Game Boy Advance, and put up a demo of the game here, which you can check out if you want to get a taste of sweet viking action.

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