"Classic and tough. Numerous and forgivable bugs prevent me giving a 10..."

There are ancient classic games you remember fondly only to find that they aren't any good, and there are games you remember as being tough only to find they're absurdly easy. Aztec was neither. It's hard, tough, and fun, if you can hack it. You're an animated white stick(and rather well animated, mind--you can jump or crawl or fight) figure with a fedora who fights his way through an eight-level game with a horizontally scrolling map of eight rooms, each with three platforms. You've got three strength units(touching monsters lowers these until you go below zero) and three sticks of dynamite to start. You can climb down stairs--not ladders, as you move diagonally down, a rarity in the early days of gaming--and can also crawl around, knife or shoot monsters(there are spiders, dinosaurs, snakes, guardians, and an octopus) and open baskets(revealing, if you're lucky, dynamite, a machette, or a pistol) in search of an idol. There are also rubbish piles where you may find a strength potion but will probably find a bomb. Of course, there are also nasty traps you must avoid. You can fall through a floor, or you can be trapped in a room without dynamite as the ceiling comes down on you. Or another trap room features a water spout where water fills the room up. Of course, sometimes you are hard-pressed to climb up stairs without getting nailed by monsters--some of which track you horizontally, so you need to run past them. Aztec itself has several scenarios(i.e. sets of 64 rooms in a certain order) and although some have overlapping levels, there are many possibilities for rooms.

Anyone who figures out the game control itself deserves a pat on the back. It's part of the challenge this game has to offer. Fortunately you can always hit the ESC key to see what does what. You'll lose a few lives unfairly, it seems. Once you learn to plan things in advance, the control becomes tolerable, however. You can toggle between fight and walk mode, where different keys give different commands, and soon enough you'll realize that the programmers did a decent job. Controls are admittedly still frustrating times when you try to shoot a monster or knife it, only to wind up dying. You have to rely a lot on tinny sound effects to tell what's happening, and it's a gratuitous part of the challenge. Some things seem inexplicable, like falling down when you walk past an open box--you're supposed to crawl. After a few hours with the game, though, you should develop a tolerance. You may even learn how to change directions walking on stairs or place a stick of dynamite. Then, when you find a way to go through a wall or make other less-than logical shortcuts, the game strategy gets funky. Perhaps the best part of the game control was the feature to save and restore a game, since it's easy to get killed quickly in this game. Save-games weren't the standard in 1982, and this feature was apt in such a tough game.

The graphics, despite numerous bumblings, are a strong point. Because the errors are, quite frankly, funny. If you blow up a wall, you can jump through it even though it would smack you in the face. Sometimes, when you're lying with stars above your head(funny stuff) you will levitate a bit before you begin to walk. You can also walk on the decorations on the bottom if the floor below you has been bombed and you fall through. The octopus(one in each scenario) is sometimes split up across a few screens, with tentacles floating around all by themselves. You'll also have to shoot some monsters you think you could knife, including some monsters that don't look like they can be shot. But despite these, the black-and-white monsters are generally very creepy, especially the dinosaurs. You can tell which ones you can broad-jump over. If your guy looks a bit dorky climbing stairs(or trying to climb on a flat surface) he is the closest to Indiana Jones a lo-resolution black-and-white pixelated bitmap can get. And he looks very cool, if a bit stiff, in action. When he falls down, which is frequently, stars appear above his head like he's some sort of wino. Then he goes back into a crouch, ready for more punishment.

I can't think of many games that have aged better than Aztec. Unless you are a crack gamer you will find even the lowest level a challenge. From there things get even more insane. Let's put it this way: you're asked to choose a difficulty level from 1 to 8. Upon rediscovering this game, I tried 1, thinking it would be the least difficult. I encountered dinosaurs on the first level every so often, and it took me several times to get by the traps. The next time I went back and tried 8. Snakes and spiders were crawling all around, and when I looked through a garbage heap I uncovered what seemed to be a lit fuse. I tried to take it, and I got blown up. But just navigating through some levels is tough, and I enjoyed mapping--and planning when to use precious dynamite to alter the maps to my benefit. Of course, the raucous graphics(are they intentional? Or not?) are a bit lucky in the longevity department.

The ludicrous and annoying stuff in Aztec is far outweighed by a magnificent adventure. I'm not sentimentally attached to this as to other Apple ''classics,'' but I found it a very hard game to pull myself away from until I'd solved a few different scenarios. I know there will be a day when I want to go and conquer the other ones.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/05/01, Updated 02/05/01