Whenever anybody asks me which game of MSX is my favourite one, I answer: "I don't have one but two favourite ones for MSX: King's Valley II and The Witch's Revenge". I can't decide between one or other, what is not offered by one is offered by the other and viceversa. Said this, King's Valley II has a special value for me. It is, in general, the videogame I have been enjoying for most of my gaming years. Not because of the number of hours spent on it, but because of how young I was when I learnt how to edit levels and even today, about twenty years after, I still have some game when I fancy. And I'll keep on doing so... Diamonds never get broken, do they?

King's Valley II is a game nothing similar to its predecessor, fairly more limited and poorer in all the sides. The game we're talking about now is a puzzle-

platform game mixture with basically two big features: the normal game consts of 60 levels where the aim is is reaching the exit door. But the door can only be opened after having all the gems... and this means avoiding enemies, scooping in the ground, drilling walls, avoiding traps, go up or down some ladders, and any mistake in the planning of the resolution of the level can be disastrous: everything is very well worked out and the F5 key, suicide, is usually pressed. Besides, the system of passwords is a big feature of King's Valley II: each level we finish we get a password, so we will never leave the game losing any progress.

The strong point of King's Valley II, the thing which makes it better than a simple cartridge, is the edit mode. Each user can create their own stages modifying absolutely everything at one's risk: terrain, number of screens, enemies, gems, traps, weapons, items, etc.; the editor of King's Valley II is one of the best I have had the opportunity to try and as an evidence of it there is the enormous and popular success this game had among the users of MSX., with thousands of users editing their own crazy mazes.

There are a lot of published and anonymous edited stages published (for instance, I edited about 70 of 'em, more even than in the actual game!), but there were so many edition contests held, that there are nowadays webpages dedicated to share levels and something incredible but real, Konami released a special cartridge made with stages edited by users of MSX. Not many of them, but the fact is unusual and it's significant of how MSX actually works. The real key here is: why? Which is that element that makes King's Valley something so attractive to anybody who tried the editor? King's Valley II is based on a wide number of elements, let's call them 'factors', to make the stages something inherent and that worth playing. There are many variants but they are limited. And it is an easy game to handle. So is the editor. The simple combination of these variants makes each stage something completely different and

unique, and fun or not, logically. The number of combinations is the number of edited stages... infinite! As I said before, the editor itself is one of the best I have ever tried. Mad on editors I am (on any system really) I can tell you that the editor of King's Valley II is, together with the one in Age of Empires II for PC -omitting any subjective opinion about Bombaman- just perfect. Clear, simple but with many options, all of them clearly functional and also helped by a clean code of fun. I would even compare the behaviour of this editor to many strategy games for PC where the game itself is edition (in fact, my favourite PC games belong to the strategy genre)... If we compare the mythic Sim City with the editor of King's Valley II, although I actually like the building-cities game, I prefer the editor of King's Valley II! Everybody should be able to try King's Valley II and take a look to test it in situ...

There are modern imitations for PC which try to improve in a humble way the original game (confer Pharao's curse) but which don't get it. Despite offering improvements that are definitive at first sight

The technical side of the game is completely secondary in such a context... But let's say the graphics are well done, in spite of its simplicity; the soundtrack is variated although limited, the sound effects are flat but they mix grace and peculiarity, and the controls can't be simpler: the arrow keys and the space bar. And F5 to suicide.

The best of the game... all said. The worst: There are no films, mobile phone games; people don't know the game.

Finally, we must say King's Valley II was released to the market as a game for MSX1 and after that as a game for MSX2 in other different cartridge which included technical improvements, graphical ones being exact. It didn't affect the game itself at all.

Would you like to try the stages that I made for King's Valley 2? I can provide you with a virtual disk file full of .elg stages! You will also find there Tako and Ika and Eggerland Mystery custom levels.

Please note this is only an user disk for those games and it does not contain a working version of any of these games. You can download this user disk by clicking on the donkeyrol button.

(increasing the number of enemies/items a screen), I must say they are contra natura, this is, the feeling of playing with two enemies or x elemments each screen is not the same if we insert there 6 enemies or a hell of thingies in a massive and crazy way. It is a simple matter of factors: King's Valley II was really right in the proportionality of screen-enemies-puzzle-platforms-length of stages. Unfortunately, this can't be improved so easily as just adding more of the same. But it is brave trying to transfer King's Valley II's playability to PC and obtain a product that may be, after all, more known by future generations than the original MSX game.