0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Ballerburg Castle Chaos

Ballerburg Castle Chaos is a real time castle siege strategy game that was influenced by the German game Ballerburg from 1987. The game was developed by ASCARON Entertainment and published by Mud Duck Productions in North America while Phoenix Games handled the European release with both releasing in January 2003.

Notable people who worked on this game, Gerald Köhler who came up with the original concept of the game for the game went on to work as a designer on the Total Club Manager and Fifa Manager series of games. Mario Endlich worked on Sacred Gold as well as Sacred 2 Fallen Angel and Ice and Blood, several other members of the Ballerburg Castle Chaos team also worked on these games.

Playing the role as the queens general Ballerburg Castle Siege is a strategy shooter with management elements with the player able to build their own castle as well as surrounding buildings such as peasant huts a smithies, siege weapons can be placed at the cost of gold which is collected as tax from your peasants.

 

The game plays a little like Worms 3D with each castle firing cannons, catapults and other weapons at each other aiming to totally destroy the opposing castle, in addition to the usual castle siege weapons, airships can be deployed as well as magical attacks such as thunderstorms, these weapon advancements can be researched and deployed by the player where they think they will do the most damage.

 

Weapons such as cannons and catapults must be aimed manually by the player  with wind speeds needing to be taking into consideration when firing, reloading also takes a few seconds which leaves your enemy and yourself vulnerable ammunition also costs gold for every shot, also when firing it is not known where the cannon or catapult round will land so several attempts may be required to score a direct hit.

 

Multiple weapons can be deployed which can be switched between to bombard your opposing castle, weapons can also be upgraded to make them even more powerful and deadly. At the same time your opponent is firing at your castle and peasants, damage to the castle can be repaired for a cost, but loss of peasants from enemy fire will result in a loss in gold revenue from your population.

This being a late release in the Playstations life cycle, so we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings for the game, where we find the game currently sitting at a user rating of 3.77/5 from a total of 11 user ratings, with a good spread of user rating for the game.

Of the 11 user ratings the lowest the game has received is a 2.5/5 with 2 users rating the game at this, another 2 users rated the game at a 3/5 with another 1 user rating it at a 3.5/5. a good number of users rated the game higher than this with 2 users each rating the game at either a 4/5, 4.5/5 or a 5/5.

On to the game difficulty level where we find a reduced number of users rating this category with just 7 users with a 57% swing in favour of the game having just the right difficulty level, a couple of users rated the game as being on the tough side, with one other user rating the game as easy averaging out at a just right difficulty level.

Lastly we have the games lifespan, with 8 users rating this category with a good spread of user ratings, with lifespan’s ranging from a minimum of 8 hours with the game with 2 users rating the games lifespan at this, another user rated the games lifespan at 12 hours.

The largest majority of users spent an impressive 40 hours with the game while 1 user each spend either 60 or 80 hours with the game, averaging out the games lifespan comes in at around 37 hours for Ballerburg Castle Siege.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude where this game seems quite common, with Gamedude paying just 25 cents if you are looking to trade in your copy of Ballerburg Castle Siege. On the other hand if you are in the market for a copy of the game, then one can be picked up pretty cheaply at $3.

Retrogames.co.uk sadly don’t stock of list the game so moving quickly on to eStarland.com we find the game listed but at the time of writing the game is currently out of stock. The game has a usual price of between $2.60 and $6.50, eStarland also offer a trade in for the game with $2.50 paid for a complete copy of the game.

Lastly we have Amazon.com where we find a good quality complete copy of the game for $8.44, this is one of only three complete used copies of the game available, the remaining two are both very good condition copies and priced at $9.99 and $10.54.

Both of these copies come with free shipping, however the $10.54 copy is shipped by Amazon so the free shipping only comes with orders over $25 or with Amazon Prime subscriptions. There are also several new copies of the game available with three copies available for $15.99, again these have free shipping and are shipped by Amazon so the minimum spend or prime membership are required for the free shipping. After this there are four other new copies of the game currently available, these are priced up between $18.97 and $22.44

Written by

P J Gibbon