Қылыштың Жылнамасы: Морганның Сатқылығы

an adventure game

Chronicles of the Sword is an adventure game developed by Synthetic Dimensions and released by Psygnosis in 1996 for MS DOS and Sony PlayStation platforms. The game, originally titled as King Arthur: The Quest of The Fair Unknown, is based on Arthurian legends and uses a point and click interface. Chronicles of the Sword tells the story of the young knight Gawain on a quest to save Camelot from the scheming witch queen Morgana. It has received largely negative reviews.

Gawain The player character, eldest son of King Lot and Arthur's sister Morgause. Gawain arrived at Camelot just the previous night before the start of the game, after having been nominated by Sir Lancelot to become a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. Later, Merlin order him to carry out the execution of Morgana using all means at his disposal. Gawain is chosen for this task precisely due to his youth and lack of experience, for Merlin hopes it will confuse and flatter the vain Morgana. Queen Morgana The game's main antagonist, Morgana is King Arthur's immoral half sister who constantly conspires against him and desires to be the ruler of all Albion. She is a witch of great dark power who once learnt much of her sorcery from Merlin himself, but now she and Merlin are bitter rivals and their past intimacy means nothing to them. Morgana has made many attempts on Arthur's life and is rumoured to be behind many mysterious deaths and disappearances, but never has left any trace of her involvement. A lascivious femme fatale of great beauty, Morgana is a master of intrigue and deception, and even without her magical powers she would make a dangerous adversary. Like Merlin, Morgana is semi immortal, In a mid 1994 version of the game, as shown to the Edge magazine, the player character was the titular Fair Unknown (Gingalain), sent to a Welsh castle to rescue a queen. Upon reaching the castle, the player had to battle various enemies, including a giant serpent (here with a backstory related to the Questing Beast), a pair of mages, and a few undead skeletons (sword fights against an enormous snake and the skeletons are actually featured in the final version, towards the end of the game in Morgana's castle). This initial mission completed, the player would then return to Camelot, "where the real meat of the game begins" (Chronicles of the Sword begins already in Camelot), and the game would also feature Merlin and Morgana. The game was advertised as using professional voice actors, but their names were not publicly disclosed. It was created using PCs and Amiga computers and Imagine and 3D Studio Max rendering programs (the graphics were first created using the palette of 16.7 million colors, before being downscaled down to only 256 colors), as well as many other techniques, "including full motion video, stop motion animation, model making, make up, rendering, pain, and hand animating." The final game is contained on two discs and was released on February 23, 1996 in North America and on May 31, 1996 in Europe. It was also the second Psygnosis published game that was based on Arthurian themes, the first being The Legend of Galahad. It was also re released in 1998.

Chronicles of the Sword was met with generally poor critical reception. As of 2014, the PC version holds the averaged GameRankings score of only 41%, based on five reviews. According to Michael L. House of allgame, Chronicles of the Sword is so "frustrating, boring, sloppy and horrible" it "deserves an award for the 'Worst Adventure Game' in the genre to date." Art Angel of GamePro described it as "so slow it should have been a simple animated movie." While he praised the voice acting and the clean cinematics, he remarked that the player character's slow movements and the excessive precision required in the point and clicking make the game dull to the point of being almost unplayable. PC Zone called it a game of "a couple of nice puzzles and some lovely graphics but little else," as the story "is dull, consisting of some medieval stereotypes presented in a fancily rendered environment." Some reviews lambasted even the game's visuals. Bob Strauss wrote in a 1996 review in Entertainment Weekly that Gawain "moves with all the speed and vitality of a knight in a 500 pound suit of armor" and the "jerky computer animated characters might have looked impressive a decade ago." NowGamer gave the PlayStation version the final verdict of "dull and painfully S L O W."

Internationally, the game's reception was less negative, but its review scores were still mostly average, including 3/5 in Génération4 in France, 50% from Gambler, 60% from Secret Service and 65% from Świat Gier Komputerowych in Poland, and three out of five stars in PC Player and 61% from Videogames in Germany. Some international reviews were more positive, like in the cases of Germany's PC Games, Spain's PCmania, and Serbia's Svet Kompjutera, who gave it unusually good ratings of 74%, 88%, and 79%, respectively.