Zole Games

Every day I’m Crystalin’

I planned on playing a bunch of video games while I was home on vacation, but what I mainly ended up playing was SNK’s sort of Zelda-like Crystalis. If you haven’t played it, it’s definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the setting is unique: it’s post-apocalyptic but cartoony and cute, with an interesting backstory and a good variety of sub-quests that have you winning over a tribe of xenophobic dwarves, unmasking a queen who moonlights as a fortune teller, bothering a surly wise man until he teaches you shapeshifting magic, and so forth.

It’s got the standard litany of NES-era problems, not the least of which is the many landmark-free mazes you have to navigate to progress (made worse by the fact that they’re scored with the game’s drearier tunes), but it’s still fun. I might recommend that you suck it up and check out the maps if you’re not 11 and full of patience and memory, like I was when I first played the game. I lost those qualities at some point and now I demand an automap when I play a game.

Here’s something about Crystalis’ story that I feel like we rarely see these days: the character you play has a central role in the conflict with the Evil Empire that’s threatening to whatever, but throughout the game you meet a group of four “wise men” (even though one of them is a woman) who seem to be the ones driving the resistance. They know what’s going on in the world, whereas you’ve just woken from cryogenic sleep. The first parts of the game feel like you’re just getting your bearings and preparing yourself for your critical role in the conflict.

In contrast, I’ve been playing Gears of War 2 and even though that game takes great pains to show that you’re fighting in one squad out of a huge army, you still feel like you’re personally driving the progress of the war you’re fighting. Hell, you pretty much feel like you are the war. But Marcus Fenix’s only remarkable quality is that he’s a “war hero”, i.e. he’s alive even though he’s been shot at a lot, probably because if he stays behind cover for a few seconds all his wounds heal.

It’s such a cliche to play the Chosen Hero in a video game that they’ve stopped bothering to justify the “chosen” part. In that light, it’s nice that Crystalis gives you a humble introduction (your first task is literally to wake a dude up) and gradually fills you in on what’s going on, why you should care, and what you can do — even if that exposition is a bit threadbare at times.

Shadowgate

I was able to get through the first half of Shadowgate because I remember most of the solutions from reading Nintendo Power in 1990. Does that seem odd? Their coverage of the game consisted of a series of screenshots and instructions that showed you exactly what to do in every room. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, so there’s no actual challenge to the game besides the puzzles.

If you don’t know the solutions, though, it’s a brutal game. Many of the puzzles straight-up kill you if you guess the wrong solution, and since the clues are often subtle or absent you’ll be guessing a lot. Everyone’s played this game, it seems, and they all shut it off in frustration after 20 minutes. Unless they read that issue of Nintendo Power.

And yet there’s something cool about it. The NES version has neat music, and the writing is sharp and often funny. You end up reading a few phrases over and over in adventure games, particularly when you’re grasping at straws and trying to USE PELICAN ON BATTERY or whatever, and most games will say “You can’t do that” or “I don’t see that here”, which is boring and frustrating when your solution makes perfect sense. Shadowgate has a few of those, but one of them is my favorite game text ever: “WHAT YOU EXPECTED HASN’T HAPPENED”. I love the sound of it, and how it subtly turns “the game is dumb” into “the player is dumb”. As a game designer you always want the latter.

Of course, I got stuck towards the end of the game because of a puzzle that’s solved by a pixel-hunt, basically. Nowadays that’s a whole genre — “hidden object games”, which I haven’t played but as I understand it consist mainly of clicking on the right thing in a picture of many things. So I guess that element I find annoying has been factored out and put somewhere it can be sought out or avoided.

NESmattering

While my GBA SP was charging last night I whipped out the Dingoo (SFW) and played some NES games.

StarTropics

I remember liking this one. The music’s neat, and the tropical setting is different. Unfortunately the control is not great — it’s sticky. You have to really lean on the control pad to turn around and all your movement is locked to a square grid, which is really annoying when you have to deal with monsters that move diagonally.

Skate or Die

I still don’t get how to reliably win a joust against the computer. The Race event is way more manageable now, though. I can totally do a gnarly jump or whatever off that one ramp. Doing a 360 in the Freestyle event doesn’t give you enough points for how difficult it is. Back in the day a friend told me that if you stay on the screen with the ramp that has an animated skull on it for long enough, you will die. This is not true.

RBI Baseball 3

Still don’t get baseball games, from this one on up to Wii Sports. Whatever happens between the pitcher and batter to make the game interesting is not visible to me.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Again, really floaty controls. I guess they’re more turtle than ninja? I lost interest by the time I got to the dam level.

Shingen The Ruler

I only bring this one up because of how baffling it is if you don’t have the manual (at least, I assume some of this is explained there). Video to follow.