The LoadDown - 03/15/2010 - Castlevania Rondo of Blood!

Another week, another batch of downloadable titles:

WiiWare --Two solid efforts this week.  Rage of the Gladiator is sort of a medieval fantasy variation on Punch-Out, with support for Wii MotionPlus.  Triple Shot Sports is a well-implemented target-shooting game, ported from the iPhone to WiiWare for a reasonable 500 points.

Wii Virtual Console --  We get a major, long-awaited title this week -- the Japanese Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (aka Dracula X: Chi no Rondo) for the PC Engine.  This game is considered to be one of the finest 2-D Castlevania games Konami ever published, and at 900 Wii points it's a heckuva lot cheaper than the original game.

DSiWare -- 4 substantial games this week; the DSi has clearly been attracting developers' attention.  Zoo Frenzy is a Tycoon-style game with animal care mini-games and a Pokemon-style collecting element.  101 Minigolf World supplies stylus-controlled miniature golf with 100 3-D holes to play.  Battle of Giants: Dinosaurs - Fight for Survival seems to be a fighting/exploration game with customizable dinosaurs.  Car Jack Streets is reminiscent of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto.

XBox Live Arcade -- Last week saw the release of one new game called Scrap Metal, an old-fashioned top-down multiplayer car combat game that feels like a pre-Playstation take on the Twisted Metal franchise.  It's well-implemented, with a victory-based mechanism for acquiring new vehicles, but the arenas are small and the gameplay doesn't feel terribly fresh.

PS3 on PSN -- Two games previously seen on other platforms hit the PS3 via PSN last week.  Popcap Games' Feeding Frenzy 2: Shipwreck Showdown arrived, along with Capcom's neo-retro Mega Man 10.

It's Just As Good As Gameboy!

Why buy a Gameboy when you could have a Gamate instead?

Well, there are many reasons, actually.

Alston Information Research's hyperbolic ad campaign is a tad misleading.  There isn't any sort of rumble-pack involved here - the hand-shaking potential of the Gamate is strictly metaphorical.  It is billed as the ultimate in hand-held entertainment, employing one of those advertising phrases that sounds like it means something but is in no way objectively verifiable.

Wikipedia's not even sure this was distributed in the US, so the Gamate may have been vaporware from the get-go.  But the more-than-50 titles promised were actually released for the original device, known in China as the Super Boy.  (The moniker would surely have provided ample lawsuit bait for both Nintendo and DC Comics if it had been retained here.)

So the Gamate may have made its only appearance on these shores in a handful of magazine ads, despite the dozens of games waiting in the wings.  Or because of them, actually.

Somehow, I can't help feeling that Witty Apee and Incantational Couple were unlikely to challenge Super Mario Land and Tetris for market dominance.

Just saying.

The Last Days of Infocom - Now With Babes!

It was the end of an era when Infocom began adding graphics to its text adventures.

And taking a bit of a different approach to its cerebral advertising:

It's still a smart joke. Kind of.  But the ad devotes more space to the attractive alien woman than to the details of the game itself.

One can't really blame the publisher, I suppose; business is business, and Mediagenic/Activision had recently acquired Infocom.  It was in the shareholders' interests for the new management to milk the company's legacy for all it was worth.  But the computer game world was changing, and the original text-only Leather Goddesses of Phobos was already being thought of as a relic of a bygone age.  To justify the additional investment in graphics and audio, it was necessary for the game to sell to a wider audience, a cause which somebody decided would be aided by trotting out yon cleavage.

Sigh.

Epitaphs in the game industry are so rarely fitting.

Clueless Gaijin Gaming - Cyber Knight

This time, I am well and truly beat.

I find myself defeated, confused, and drowning in a sea of language I am ill-equipped to comprehend.  For this is Cyber Knight, a Japanese game that's as opaque as any I've attempted to tackle.

The game was produced by Tonkin House and released in 1992 for the PC Engine as well as the Nintendo Super Famicom.  And the game's challenges begin immediately, with the simple and unattractive preliminary title screen:

I don't know what the menu options represent.  I don't remember how I got past this screen.  I pushed buttons at random, punching blindly in the night.  But at last, I emerged into the sunlight, holding the more attractive real title screen in my torn and bloodied claws:

 

 The kana characters scrolled by for an eternity.  I knew they were trying to tell me something, but I was unable to accelerate or interrupt the endless flow of incomprehensible information.  The music was lovely, exciting and insistent with nicely sampled orchestra hits.  But suddenly I was in the middle of a space battle, and I didn't even know which side I was on:

At last I found myself aboard a strange craft, confronted with a list of alien symbols -- S I recognized, L too, but nothing else made sense:

I wandered around, and found some numbered lockers.  But what was in them or what purpose they served, I was unable to discover, despite the efforts of the pleasant creature who tried to assist me:

I lowered the ship to a nearby planet's surface, and raised it into space again.  I did so multiple times, searching vainly for a way to disembark, and succeeding only in achieving repeated liftoffs and landings.  I wandered through the game's menus over and over, seeking some familiar word or custom.  At last I found some statistics, though what they were meant to quantify remained woefully out of my grasp:

After further menu exploration, I at last emerged on the planet's surface:

When I wandered into the building nearby, the nature of this world became clear at last -- it's an RPG, with mechs and sci-fi gewgaws substituted for swords and sorcery.  The older gentleman with bowed head is presumably a leader of some sort, the young lady at his side his queen, or daughter, or consort, and the land, one assumes, is in grave peril from encroaching evil:

With no grasp of the quest itself, our party of three wanders out into a dungeon, and soon meets with ignominous defeat, as within two rounds we have all been turned to stone by some shell-like robots, and I can't figure out how to unfreeze us:

Sometimes this is more of a relief than it ought to be:

The music really is quite pleasant, and if I could understand the story -- or the menus -- I would probably find this to be a fun, competently-executed JRPG.  It seems to have some depth, and I like the mixture of mechs with a traditional Final Fantasy-style role-playing experience.

But sometimes one really does need to speak the language to get by.

In Praise of Resident Evil 5

Capcom's venerable Resident Evil series disappointed some gamers with the fifth core title released last year.  Resident Evil 5 built on the more action-oriented style of play established in RE4, but emphasized cooperative play with online and local support for two players.  So ingrained in the game's design is the team approach that the single-player experience relies on an automated partner character, who seems to spend most of her time getting in the way and wasting healing herbs.

I wasn't in a rush to play RE5, given its lukewarm market reception, but on Valentine's Day this year my wife and I were in the mood for something new and picked it up at its discounted price (on disc, just a few days before it debuted as a downloadable XBox On Demand title.)  I have played through most of the Resident Evil games over the years, but my wife's direct experience with Capcom's bio-horrors has been limited to the two Wii light-gun shooters; they're great fun, but they're a different sort of experience.

Fortunately, Resident Evil 5 really shines with two local players who know each other well.  The split screen allows each character to explore on his or her own, but the game mechanics for assistance and healing also mean it's not a good idea to become separated.  It's valuable to have one player (usually me) covering for any unexpected attacks while the other (usually my wife) scavenges for ammo and healing herbs.  We've been having a great time planning strategies, exploring, and hastily improvising during those panic-inducing Majini onslaughts.  And when we die, as we occasionally do, we're grateful for the breather and the chance to upgrade our equipment and plan a new approach.

With two players, Capcom's design preserves what RE has always done well -- the series has become more action-oriented over time, but this fifth chapter still maintains a palpable sense of tension and surprise throughout, especially during sections where the players are forced to separate.  Helping my wife jump across the street to another building, then doing my best to protect her from the rampaging infected using a sniper rifle from a distance, while she fought her way downstairs to unlock the door so I could join her -- this is the stuff memories are made of.

So kudos to Capcom for taking a chance and taking a popular series in a bold new direction. Videogaming is too often a solitary exercise; what's great about RE5 is that we've now both "been to" this virtual world, and we've done it together.  So I must respectfully disagree with some players' reaction to the latest Resident Evil -- the co-op approach may not be what everyone wanted, but the design takes the concept seriously, and it works spectacularly well.  RE5 remains hardcore enough to be challenging -- ammo and supplies are always limited -- but it's also welcoming and flexible enough to allow two players of disparate experience to have intense, challenging fun together.

We couldn't have asked for a better Valentine's Day gift.

Video Podcast: Decade of the Drug Lords

This week on the podcast, a look at the quintessential video game villains of the 1990's -- Drug Lords!

Adventure of the Week: Blade of Blackpoole (1983)

This week, we're taking a look back at a classic Apple II adventure (also released for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64) -- Tim Wilson's Blade of Blackpoole, published in 1983 by Sirius Software.

The graphic illustrations are simple and schematic, even crude, but the display system is technically impressive in other ways.  The draw-and-fill artwork renders very quickly, and the layout doesn't rely on the Apple II's standard 4-line text window -- instead, it renders a full 8 lines of text using characters drawn in graphics mode, and does so with acceptable speed.

The game starts us off in the countryside, and most of the adventure takes place outdoors.  There are plenty of tricky puzzles, a number of unusual items that go unused, and several ways to mess up irrevocably.  The parser is also misleading in a number of spots, and downright buggy in others.

As always, I recommend playing any of the adventure games I cover on your own before reading further here, if you're inclined to do so.  I'll be giving away a number of secrets and surprises in the interest of documenting the game. That is to say...


***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****


Blade of Blackpoole is well written from a textual perspective, with brief but evocative descriptions, but I wish there were more detailed EXAMINE support -- most of the items yield YOU SEE NOTHING OF INTEREST.  Unfortunately, limited disk space was a real handicap for these early graphic adventures -- space devoted to illustrations often meant text content had to be tightly budgeted.

At the start of the game, obstacles abound.  There's a landslide to the north, a carnivorous plant to west, and dangerous quicksand to the east (with no warning before entering it, although it's not difficult to escape if one doesn't panic).  The player starts out with a money belt containing 50 gold pieces; it's rare and pleasant to see a little adventuring forethought on the part of the main character.

The local tavern is nicely rendered compared to most of the game's imagery, and the bartender sets up the story in case we haven't read the manual.  We learn that the name of the titular Blade is Myraglym, and that we are on a quest to recover it.  We can also buy several items at the shop next door, although the shopkeeper is very strict -- if we drop anything at all in the shop, we cannot simply TAKE it, even if we own it -- we must BUY it back!  Given the game's tight six-item inventory limit, a fair amount of juggling is required until we figure out what's truly needed and what can be safely ignored or left behind after its utility has been exhausted.

The SAVE GAME command is complemented by a RESUME command, rather than the more standard RESTORE or LOAD GAME.  The game supports 10 save slots on the game data disk, but I had difficulty getting the mechanism to work successfully using the AppleWin emulator; saving and restoring the emulator's complete state proved much more reliable.

We discover a small boat in a lake that's not much larger near the beginning of the game.  We can PADDLE WEST and PADDLE EAST all day to no practical effect, but cannot easily TAKE BOAT to a more productive location.  We must find the white potion, which isn't labeled; in my case, I drank it and learned, fatally, that it's a shrinking potion. as YOU WERE SMOTHERED BY YOUR OWN CLOTHES AS THEY FELL ON YOU.  I wasn't sure its effects were consistent, though, as when I tried to use it on the carnivorous plant, this exchange ensued:

POUR POTION
PUT THE POTION WHERE?
ON PLANT
IT'S GOT FLAME RETARDENT [sic] BARK

I got the same response when I attempted to BURN PLANT, so this was probably a glitch, but it threw me off for a while.  There seem to be some parser bugs around the plant in general.  I tried to SING PLANT, hoping to put it to sleep, and was told A VERY NICE MELODY. THANK YOU THE PLANT WOULD PROBABLY CATCH YOU IN MID-AIR.  The second phrase is the response to JUMP PLANT, so clearly something's amiss in the dictionary here.

Back to the boat.  A walkthrough finally clued me in that I could POUR POTION ON BOAT to shrink it down to a more portable size, which had occurred to me already.  But the syntax is critical -- this similar sequence I had attempted earlier was unsuccessful:

POUR POTION
PUT THE POTION WHERE?
ON BOAT
THAT DOESN'T WORK.  

I also spent some time wrestling with the quicksand.  Entering the muddy yellow lake and trying to CLIMB ROPE yielded THERE'S NO ROPE TIED UP HERE, so I speculated we must have to TIE ROPE somewhere.  But I couldn't TIE ROPE TO ROCK or TIE ROPE TO TREE to escape the quicksand.  Further experimentation established that we can simply SWIM [direction] to maneuver in and escape from the quicksand; as long as we keep moving we don't drown.

There are several potentially useful items found or available for purchase near the beginning of the game -- a shield, a hammer, a battle axe, and a sharp knife -- all of which prove to be totally useless for purposes of actually completing the game.

At one point we discover a recluse living behind a tree, although he never comes out to show himself; he says, "BRING ME THE JEWEL OF SELMARN AND I'LL TELL YOU AN INTERESTING RIDDLE."  It's important to remember where we ran into him, as he does not put in any repeat appearances until we find the amulet with the jewel in it and are in a position to GIVE AMULET, which he rewards with a bit of doggerel containing a useful clue:

A vintage walkthrough helped me out in several spots.  At one point, I couldn't GET HIVE or THROW HONEY, and was pretty sure I was on the wrong track, but the walkthrough pointed out I could GET BEES.  I tried to THROW BEES at the carnivorous plant, but only learned THE BEES FLEW AWAY AFTER STINGING YOU ONCE MORE.  For some reason I then tried to SWALLOW BEES, ending my game as SEVERAL BEES STUNG YOUR THROAT AS YOU SWALLOWED THEM AND SUFFOCATED YOU.  FEED BEES and FEED PLANT also did not work, but the handy walkthrough told me to GIVE BEES to the carnivorous plant, which made it happy enough to let me pass at will.

Frequent saving is virtually required by the game's design.  At one point we fall into a dark pit in the woods, without warning.  Even if we have the old lamp, we can't light it yet; we have to THROW ROPE, then CLIMB ROPE to get out on the other side.  And the rope gets left on the ground after climbing out of the pit, so if we try to go south again we get stuck if we didn't remember to pick it up again.

Once we have the lamp lit, we can't UNLIGHT, TURN OFF, EXTINGUISH or otherwise stop the lamp from running.  But the game doesn't appear to have a tight limit on the duration of the light, if indeed there is any limit.

The game presents a couple of useful clues in the form of short poems, and some magic words turn up as well.  Unfortunately, one of the magic words causes all of our inventory items to disappear, never to be seen again, so it's again important to SAVE before doing any experimentation.

There's a river monster blocking the way at one point -- the game tells us he is hungry, but we don't have anything to feed him, we can't get close enough to KILL MONSTER in our boat, and jumping into the water to SWIM is immediately fatal due to the strong currents.  I needed the walkthrough to learn I was supposed to have a mug of ale at this point, and of course by this stage of the story I couldn't go back to the tavern to buy it without restoring.  Once I had worked my way back to face the monster, GIVE ALE yielded only THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.  Walkthrough to the rescue once more -- POUR ALE IN WATER produces the desired effect:

Near the end of the game, Sirius Software's alien mascot character appears as a pagan idol:

A spell book given to us by the recluse indicates we can SAY SOLOCIN here, as a prayer, but all that produces is a hint about a later event.  We actually have to GIVE BOOK to obtain a vital key.

My next sticking point was at a cave blocked by a boulder, where I spent some time ineffectually waving various inventory items at the implacable hunk of rock between useless bouts of PUSHing and KICKing.  Without the walkthrough I might never have learned that, for some mysterious reason, simply attempting to move W gets the boulder out of the way.


The game's only true maze lies beyond a locked door - we have to enter it to find a longbow and a scroll with a couple of magic words on it.  I was running out of inventory items to drop as bread crumbs while mapping out the maze, and learned to my chagrin that one must never DROP LAMP -- it goes out on impact and we're stuck, unable to return to any location where it can be lit.  The maze is even more convoluted than the norm -- no direction takes us back where we came from, and there's only really one path back out.  Once the two key items have been found, it seems the best bet is to keep going E until we emerge at the entrance.

Nearing the finale, the walkthrough saved me yet again -- I was trying to SWIM DOWN, DIVE, even PADDLE DOWN at a suspicious spot in the lake, to no avail.  All I had to do was move D.  This takes us to the lizard's lair, where we use a magic word to conjure an arrow, which we then use with the longbow to SHOOT LIZARD.  The sword lies in a chamber nearby.

Here's where it gets a bit tricky.  At this point, we have the sword but the game is not quite over.  There's a sign in the cave -- we can READ SIGN, but the text is clearly displayed in the illustration -- which warns us:  SPEAK NOT THE NAME MYRAGLYM UNTIL SHE IS HOME.  This advice must be taken seriously -- we have to bring the sword back to a specific spot, and drop it there, before saying its name.  If we say it in the wrong room, we learn that THE SWORD GLOWED BRIGHTLY AND EXPLODED IN A BRIGHT BLUE FLASH.  If we are in the right room but haven't put it in place, it explodes AND we are trapped by a cave-in.  When we say it after putting it in its proper home, we are magically returned to the forest with the legendary sword in hand.

Unfortunately for my playthrough, so close to the climax, I had to revert to a much earlier save once again, as hunger overtook me and I shortly ran out of energy:  YOU PASSED OUT FROM HUNGER AND WERE EATEN BY ROVING WOLVES.  Backtracking, I left the honey near the room we land in upon our return -- EAT HONEY established that YOU FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW.

Finally, we are able to drag ourselves back to the tavern where all the adventurers hang out, the Blade of Blackpoole clutched impressively in our bee-stung, honey-stained grasp:

This was a moderately difficult adventure for me -- I definitely needed the walkthrough, and in some cases my ideas weren't even close.  But I have to blame the parser to some degree as well -- in several cases I was trying things that should have worked but simply didn't, and didn't produce any interesting responses that might have put me on the right path.  Still, parser struggles are part of the experience of playing these vintage games, and I had a good time struggling through to find the fabled Blade of Blackpoole.