Cauldron and Cauldron 2

[Zagrebo]

The first Cauldron is pretty good with an interesting open world structure and different gaming styles (scrolling shooter and platform game) although the platforming sections were largely ruined on the ZX Spectrum version due to the terrible collision detection. Me and my brothers used to sing a song called "We've been around the world with Mrs Witch" to the tune of the Button Moon theme when playing it when we flew so far that the map wrapped-around. Kids, eh?

Cauldron 2 is stupidly tricky to play but actually quite good once you get the hang of it and it's nice to see a sequel which not only completely changes the gameplay but actually reverses the "side" the player takes, so in the first game you play the witch trying to overthrow the tyrannical pumpkin and in the second game you play a pumpkin trying to overthrow the witch from the first game.

Never played Super Cauldon. Did it fit into the same narrative of the first two games or was it a sequel in name only?

[andyc]

Well Super Cauldron had you playing a witch and there were definitely some bouncing pumpkins in it. And it was stupidly difficult. How "official" a sequel it was, I'm not entirely sure but I was always under the impression it was. The CPC version was very impressive, but the Amiga/Atari versions always seemed like 8 bit games ideas that were rather underwhelming on the 16-bit hardware.

[Xyphoe]

Super Cauldron looked absolutely stunning on the Amstrad CPC, I'm currently working my way through a longplay on YouTube (Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMTiqVCuBGw), part 3 should be up online later this morning.

And yes it was an official sequel. Palace Software eventually folded into Titus software (who put out Super Cauldron) including all their licenses.