Dungeons Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara

This game adds two characters not found in the original game: a female Thief and a male Mage. This version also allows up to two players to select the same character but with different costumes/graphics, thus allowing for a total of twelve "different" characters to choose from. Additionally, this game also has several new features such as character specialty attacks and immunity from "friendly fire."

The players are adventurers: a human fighter, a human Cleric, a female Elf warrior-mage, a Dwarven warrior, a female human Thief and a human Magic User. They travel from place to place performing heroic deeds and making the world safe from the forces of darkness, all the while fighting monsters, gathering treasure and advancing in power.

BUG: Choose a character with a 6-character name. Press the name button and then erase it and start pressing buttons to put your own letters in. The timer to enter your name will reset as long as you are pressing buttons to enter letters. What happens is that you can continue to enter more letters than the code expects and you begin to over-write the area of memory that contains character information and inventory. Depending on what letters you enter and how many you enter you can continue the game at the beginning of the next stage and already be Hasted, Invulnerable, Invisible, possessing powerful weapons, etc. The character info on screen is all garbled. Once you make it to the first shop you can drag apparently empty inventory items into the trash for large sums of silver. The game will lock up quite frequently though - especially when you pick up items that hold specific places in memory. Try using about 110 M's for a name. This glitch was removed with the later revision.

TIP: There is a 3rd cursed sword in the game, It is located near the 1st/2nd dragon when falling downwards through a level. Pick up the cursed sword and keep using it. It will slowly kill you and it cannot be fixed by the cleric. If you persevere for long enough, it will be unleashed and un-curse itself. This is the legendary sword the game keeps making references to when you complete it. It does horrendous damage and is very fast. It's best used with the dwarf and his whirlwind attack but works equally well with the invulnerable thief.

The gameplay and graphics are like an updated version of Capcom's Final Fight. The little sword-swinging flourish the fighter does after defeating a major enemy is taken directly from Capcom's previous side-scrolling sword fighting game, Knights Of The Round.

Although this game is a direct swap for other CPSII games such as Dungeons Dragons: Tower Of Doom, the locations of the "Select Option" and "Fire Option" buttons are reversed when compared to the original game.

The game forbids the initials 'SEX' on the name selection screen. If you try, it gets changed based on the character you choose:

Fighter : 'CRASSUS'
Cleric : 'GRELDON'
Elf : 'LUCIA'
Magic User : 'SYOUS'

The third and fourth player controls are mapped to the option connector on the CPS2 board. The fourth button for players one and two are mapped to the JAMMA connector on pins 25 and c, respectively.

This game suffers from the usual Capcom battery death problem. The only fix for most of these games is to return the board to Capcom for repair.