The Sentinel (video game)

The Sentinel is a surreal computer game from the year 1986. It is a mixture of chess and puzzles and was developed by Geoff Crammond. The game was released for all major systems of the time ( first Firebird for the Commodore 64), and received positive reviews. Appeared in 1998 with Sentinel Returns of Psygnosis, a successor to the PlayStation and Windows PC.

Game play

The game consists of 10,000 planes that are structured like a chess board, but the fields are located at different heights. The aim of the game is to defeat the Sentinel every level and thereby move to the next level. Your own character is a robot that is on a field within the chessboard. The robot has its own three or more energy points. The Sentinel is within one level to the most elevated field slowly rotates around its own axis and looks like this in a period of about one minute over the entire plane. If he sees this on a field with an object that has more than one power point, thus he cut off the object and creates energy at the same time in another field a new object ( a tree ) with an energy value of one. The Sentinel process deprives the robot energy points and creates new fields on other trees ( one for each confiscated energy value of the robot ). A podium, he transforms into a tree, and creates simultaneously on another box, type a new tree.

The player can collect energy points in the game by objects such as a tree or a pedestal absorbed and adds the appropriate number of energy points his robot. The custom robots can act from his point of view only on fields that he can see from above.

In addition to the Sentinel, there may be several more guards in a plane. The guards perform the same role like the Sentinel, but the player must defeat the Sentinel to win the game.

Game characters and game objects

Game strategy

The player can win against the Sentinel as follows:

• With his own power points he has to create on another box a pedestal. He can then another robot ( in addition to its currently active robots) build on the podium. He must use a corresponding number of energy points for both actions.
• Now the player can transfer to the new robot and absorb his previous robot. He resumes the appropriate number of energy points.
• The player or the robot is now higher and can now view more fields from above and thus influence these fields. So he can on fields that he could not yet see his lower location, act and create objects on these.
• These actions are repeated until the player with his robot can see the field of the Sentinels and absorb this. Finally, he has yet to transfer one last time with his robots on the field of the former Sentinels and ' warp ' in one of the next levels.
• Per point of Energy, the robot has to this point, the player jumps to the next level. If the player is, for example, in level 15 and has at the time of warping 12 energy points so it will immediately jump to level 27
• The player will now receive an entry code for the level and can start right in this plane the next game.

The player loses to the Sentinel, if he can see his field and aims to reduce the energy value of the field to one. The player's robot loses a power point after another. If the energy points of the robot has fallen to less than three, the Sentinel has won and the game is over.

Optical game presentation

The player sees the level from the perspective of the robot and looks at the 3D landscape of the plane which looks like a small mountain. This has the consequence that he standing only a very limited view has on a lower field within a plane on the plane and the orientation within the plane is difficult. During the game, the player or his robot works on higher-lying fields within the plane, thus gaining an ever better overview of the entire plane.