Death Sword

Introduction :

The evil sorcerer Drax has captured Princess Mariana and will only release her if a champion from the Jewelled City can defeat his guardians.  You are a Barbarian from the North - can you save the Princess?  This game was infamous for its advertising, a scantily clad Page 3 girl on the front cover offended some people!  The game itself is a good one, especially in two player mode.

Barbarian is well known sword wielding beat 'um up released in 1987 and re-released in 1988 on a number of platforms. This game had so many charms from the ability to defeat your opponent very quickly to the mad goblin who cleaned up the mess to the scanty clad maidens you rescued. The game was quite gory and with a more mature nature to its design which was unusual for the time with the covers for the Commodore 64 version for example having a semi naked women along with the buff barbarian on the cover. As you battled in the single player you would face a number of bosses being watched by sorcerer Drax on a chair in the background with the maiden you fighting to free.

The Goblin

If you succeeded in killing your enemy a very ugly goblin creature came on the screen to drag the body away and the game would make you wait as he did so and he did so quite slowly. If you had managed to chop the head off your opponent the Goblin would return to get rid of the head and would proceed to kick it off the screen with a pop/thud sound as it did so.

The start

Unlike many other beat 'um up games at the time and after Barbarian allowed you to move back and forward before the battle officially started

Web Of Death

Just as in the movie the barbarian one of your special movies was a web of death where you would start flaying your sword in some of circular motion which could be used as an offensive block as well as a general damage inflicting attack.

Head Chop

You spin around thrusting your sword toward you opponent and with correct contact would proceed to chop the head off of your opponent ending the fight with you the victor.
Probably the most interesting move of the game for two main reasons. Not only was it very easy to pull off with the ability to move about before the start of the fight you could position yourself in such a way where with timing you could pull off this head chop at the very start of the fight. With this you would instantly chop the head off the NPC as you played through the single player and could do so for several rounds even as the npc enemy got harder. Eventually with different timing needed this would fail but then a fall back placing yourself close off the screen enabled you to pull the same move off again with good timing to end the battle very easily.

A number of the sounds in the game were samples directly take from Arnold Schwarznegger from the movie Barbarian and Brigitte Nielson AKA Red Sonja.