- Astérix / Taz (Atari 2600)
- Obelix
- Asterix and the Magic Potion
- Asterix and Obelix: The Odyssey
- Asterix and the Magic Cauldron
- Asterix at Rahàzade
- Asterix: Operation Getafix
- Astérix (Arcade)
- Astérix (SMS)
- Astérix (NES/GB/SNES)
- Astérix and the Great Rescue
- Astérix and The Secret Mission
- Astérix and the Power of Gods
- Asterix: Caesar’s Challenge
- Astérix & Obélix: Die Suche nach dem Schwarzen Gold
- Astérix & Obélix Take on Caesar
- Astérix & Obélix
- Astérix & Obélix XXL
- Astérix & Obélix XXL 2
As the ’90s approached, Nintendo had taken over the video game world with Sega being in close second. With games like Super Mario Bros. and Alex Kidd, platformers had seen a revolution and became the gameplay of choice across consoles and home computers in an attempt to cash in on the kids who yearned for the next mascot to jump onto enemies and collect coins. Coktel Vision would completely ignore this platformer movement and instead go back in time, back to their very first Asterix game released on the Thomson MO5.
Asterix: The Menhir is more or less an updated version of Asterix and the Magic Potion. The premise is the same – you walk around to collect ingredients for a potion. In order to progress to one area you must find a specific item, which leads to backtracking through the woods and village. As you find various items, you have to go back into the village and test the combinations in Panoramix to see if it cures him. If it’s wrong, you gotta go out in the world again and try over and over again. Everything is out to kill you, as you’ll have to fend your way through Romans, wild boars, flying fish and other hazards. You also gotta be careful cause the ol’ hunger meter is back so if you don’t eat, it spells defeat.
Also like Asterix and the Magic Potion, the games story is based on a central plot point of an Asterix movie. This game is a video game tie-in to the cartoon that was released at the time under the same name where Panoramix has gone crazy due to an accident involving a menhir falling over him. Without Panoramix the village seems doomed and they put their faith on a traveler who recently came to town named Prolix. Asterix does not trust Prolix and decides along with Obélix to try to help Panoramix return to his old self. This leads to a great disconnect between Asterix and the other villagers, and the race is on to cure Panoramix before the Romans catch wind of the current situation and attack.
This game suffers from some very delayed and stubborn controls which turns nearly all actions in the game into a mess. It seems that it takes Asterix well over a second to respond to your input and when he finally does, the animation rolls by so fast that you’re most likely to miss it and figure it just didn’t register. While the graphics are actually very good and the sprites are big and detailed, the jerky scrolling and horrible hit detection makes the otherwise eye pleasing journey into a frustrating mess of flaws and outdated gameplay. This would be Coktel Vision’s last Asterix game before the license would be handed over to other companies, and it’s a fitting end to their circle. All their games felt very outdated and were plagued with very basic game design flaws, and this game perfectly collects all these “traits”. There’s little music to be found outside of a very strange crazy opening melody during the title screen, which is a shame because the movie had some fantastic music by Michel Colombier. Speaking of the title screen, who knows what is going on there…
The game was released on many platforms with all versions being identical apart from a few having blue borders around the screen.