Now THIS is an interesting game… interesting and strange, but totally brilliant!

The story? You and your band of heroes need to save Megalopolis from five dangerous criminals who have done a prison break. Battle through the streets (well, a strange city of platforms and ladders and keys) and get them baddies. There are 50 levels in the full version, so you get to face one every 10 levels.

Play as the Rocketress, Leadman, The Flea, The Drip, Spaced Cadet, The Flying Squirrel and Gumwad. You don’t need to worry about choosing, because once one gets into trouble you can use any of the others to help you out! Very handy. Being able to play as seven different characters. Your standard platform game with a twist. Yes, you still have to jump and climb and shoot etc, but your different characters have different specialties. The Rocketress has a rocket, The Drip turns into a pool of water, you get the idea. I wouldn’t want to ruin the strange surprises Their individual shots (they all just shoot little balls of “stuff”) do different things to the various enemies. The Drip took out the fire when I used him… I hope that was on purpose!

The characters also have different abilities. Gumwad can climb walls (I guess it’s because he’s so sticky), The Flying Squirrel didn’t mind going in the water, Does this remind you of a certain television show? I wonder if any of these characters can heal on their own, I didn’t discover if any of them could. None of them seem to be wearing any cheerleader costumes or are Asians called Hiro.

The highlight of this game is the objects you collect to gather points! Yes, you get gems you can use and keys etc, but that’s not as fun as gathering baseballs, diskettes, stamps and toilet paper. Oh, that gave me the giggles. I had to pause the game and show everyone in my family.

The game works wonderfully in DOSBox. The controls are simple, nice and standard DOS game stuff. ALT to shoot, CTRL to fire. I love that. Nice, predictable and easy-to-use.

Music is provided a mash-up of Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. This creates quite an ambient if not rather strange atmosphere. But hey, they were thinking when they chose that, royalty free music Sounding very funky on the PC speaker! It actually goes quite well, is a nice change from the beeep-beeeeep-bip-bip-beep-whine soundtrack you normally get with PC speaking platformers.

Initally when this game was released in 1993 and didn’t do too well, a publisher picked the game up and it was released as shareware in 1994. The shareware version was called Heroes 1/4: The Tantalizing Trio (I’ve made that available to download as a resource, just for the hell of it). A big hats off to the creator of this game Jeffrey Fullerton for releasing the full version as freeware. He knows how to preserve his good work for all future generations.

Beware the vicious bunnies. Vicious! Yes, you will have to kill them. When bunnies go bad, eh? *sniff*

Here are some screenshots from the shareware version, Heroes 1/4: The Tantalizing Trio:

Related Links

• MobyGames: Heros: The Sanguine Seven
  Read all about it on MobyGames.
• Wikipedia: Heros: The Sanguine Seven
  Read all about it on Wikipedia.
• Jeffrey Fullerton's Homepage
  Download the game from here also, and get more information. Maybe you can send him a nice email thanking him for making this game freeware!?