Why did they come up with games like this? Games that were so difficult they'd leave you wanting to smash your disk drive out of pure rage. Shamus was Inspired by the arcade game Berzerk, which I actually played on the Vectrex. The goal of the game is to move your character, a detective, through a 128-room maze of electrified walls, eventually reaching the "Shadow's Lair". While en route to the lair, you must eliminate a series of robot enemies. The walls in each room are electrified, and if you touch them it's instant death. Once you clear a room, you can pick up special items and exit. Every time you return, the enemies are regernated. The game was unique in that the combination of locks and keys required the player to complete each of its four levels in a particular order. To complete the game in its entirety would take several hours, which combined with the lack of a pause function, the necessity of remembering the location of dozens of rooms and keys, and the frenetic gameplay meant that this was extremely difficult to accomplish.
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