A playthrough of ADK and SNK's 1996 arcade-platformer for the Neo Geo CD, Magician Lord. Played through on the normal difficulty level. Magician Lord is an awesome fantasy action-platformer that originally came out back in 1990 for the Neo Geo MVS arcade hardware and in 1991 for the AES home system. It was the first Neo Geo title to be created by Alpha Denshi, who would later become much better known for the World Heroes series. The game, shipping on a 46 megabit cartridge, was very impressive, especially when you consider that the SNES hadn't been released yet and Sega Genesis carts were still maxing out at 8 megabits. The characters were huge and colorful, the music boomed with the glorious racket of noisy bass and drum samples - it fully delivered on SNK's promise of bringing the true arcade experience home. Of course, for a $200 cartridge to play on a $650 system, it needed to. The AES was never meant to compete with the likes of Nintendo and Sega in the home space, though. It was a high-end, luxury piece of kit for people that didn't mind paying for the best and didn't want to haul an arcade cabinet into their house. Still, many people *wanted* that experience at home, just in a more affordable package, and that was exactly what SNK delivered with the Neo Geo CD system. It was still expensive, as the system's price was more in-line with then brand-new 32-bit systems (but the games were only $50 each brand new - a very big deal!), but it was awfully late to the party (being launched at the end of 1995, putting it in direct competition with systems that could do proper 3D graphics), and many games were infamously plagued with looooong load times, but nevertheless, it put SNK's iconic line of games within reach of the masses like never before. And despite the notoriety it gained for its woefully inadequate CD access speeds, most of the older games didn't suffer much from the issue: as long the game's data could fit within the system's 56 megabits of RAM (!!), it only had to load once when booting the system. Magician Lord was one of those games, and this is the reason why you never see the load screen again after the initial 15 second start-up period. Otherwise, it's nearly identical to the original AES release. I say "nearly" because the music is different. If you compare the two versions side-by-side, you'll notice that the CD version's sound quality is a substantial improvement over the original cart's. This version's music is all in Redbook format and streams directly off the disc during play, and while the music didn't get remixed for this port, the samples are all of much higher quality, and as a result, they sound much less tinny and out-of-tune than the cart's samples did. Besides that, though, it's the same beautiful, fluid, and insanely difficult platformer that it always had been, and I loved it. This was the version that I had, and I played it nonstop for quite some time. But I'm not kidding about the difficulty - the game is probably so well known because of how hard it is. Enemies constantly flood the screen at angles that are difficult to hit, there's a nasty Castlevania-style knock-back when you get hit, and power-ups aren't dropped very often at all - and God help you if you pick the wrong ones. A couple of those transformations are little more than a death-sentence in the final few stages! And those frogs are the spawn of Satan himself. I'm certain of it. I do also have a playthrough up of the AES version of the game ( ), but I was quite a bit more adventurous in my playing this time around. I branched out and used more than just the Dragonwarrior this time, which makes it harder, but does changes things up quite a bit. If you like, you can also find my compilation of all of the game's cutscenes, complete with all sorts of crazy Engrish, here: _ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete ( punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
