Adventure of the Week: Snow Joke (1991)

It's snowing heavily in Michigan as I write this, so it seemed like a good day to tackle Scott Denyer's 1991 adventure Snow Joke, a Delbert the Hamster Software title distributed by Zenobi for the Sinclair Spectrum ZX computers:

It's written using P.A.W.S., and the setup has us stuck in the snow -- and trapped in the car, with the doors frozen shut, in the middle of nowhere.  So it appears that this will be an escape-the-room adventure.

Interested readers are always advised to tackle these games before proceeding here -- the Balrog himself, Zenobi founder John Wilson, is making all of his company's games freely available on his blog as I write this, so these are becoming much easier to get hold of (his compilation CDs have been out of print for a while.)  Snow Joke is brief and fairly simple, though occasionally irritating -- most of the issues I ran into were parser conflicts between how I thought something should be done and how the designer thought it should be done.  There's not a lot to spoil, but there will definitely be...

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

After this brief and entertaining intro, we find ourselves locked in the car with nothing in inventory, and the only visible item is a box of matches. The glove compartment is locked.  And we can die in a scant ten turns while we're trying to get our bearings, as The cold finally catches up on you, and you tragically freeze to death!

Ice has formed on the keys, so they are now immovable.  MATCH and MATCHES are treated as the same word in the dictionary, and I failed in my attempts to STRIKE MATCH ON BOX or LIGHT MATCH or THAW KEYS.

EXAMINE CAR establishes that the car contains a passenger seat, a back seat, a driving seat and a dashboard.  SEARCH PASSENGER SEAT -- to my aggravation -- does not turn up anything, as the parser doesn't really recognize the word, but EXAMINE PASSENGER SEAT discovers a coat.  It seems wise to TAKE COAT and WEAR COAT.

We can see a panel behind the back seat, screwed into place providing access to the boot.  EXAMINE FLOOR yields a small metal cup (LOOK FLOOR and SEARCH FLOOR do not.)  I tried to WARM KEYS WITH HANDS and BLOW ON KEYS and PULL KEYS, to no avail.  I tried to LOOK UNDER PASSENGER SEAT and SEARCH UNDER PASSENGER SEAT, but we have to EXAMINE UNDER PASSENGER SEAT to find a screwdriver.  (This is doubly hard to come up with as the player, because EXAMINE UNDER DRIVING SEAT yields the same response as EXAMINE DRIVING SEAT, and the same goes for the back seat.  Only the passenger seat behaves differently.)

With the screwdriver, we can readily UNSCREW PANEL and see into the boot, where we find a blowtorch and a lot of ice.  We can't MELT ICE WITH BLOWTORCH, of course, but we can LIGHT BLOWTORCH with the matches to pursue other alternatives -- and yes, we can now just MELT ICE.  Except this melts the ice in the boot and ignores the ice on the keys on the steering wheel.  MELT KEYS, THAW KEYS, and HEAT WHEEL don't produce any interesting results either.

Instead of melting the ice, and allowing it to vanish into a puddle of water that apparently never refreezes, can we backtrack and TAKE ICE IN CUP?  No, It's too cold.  But we can FILL CUP WITH ICE.  And then HEAT CUP, twice, to melt the ice and get the resulting water to the boiling point.  And then we can DIP KEYS IN CUP... no... THAW KEYS WITH WATER... no... POUR WATER ON KEYS... Over what?  Aha!  We have to POUR WATER OVER KEYS.

The game now tells us, if we try to UNLOCK GLOVE BOX, that it will be more user-friendly and allow us simply to EXAMINE GLOVE COMPARTMENT.  We can find a small ice pick, but of course the ice is outside the car.

We can't ROLL DOWN WINDOW -- You can't travel anywhere -- or OPEN WINDOW, or BREAK WINDOW WITH PICK.  EXAMINE DOOR shows it is still Frozen shut from the outside.  POUR WATER OVER DOOR yields only Over what?  We can't OPEN DOOR or PICK DOOR or PRY DOOR or INSERT PICK or KICK DOOR, or POP BOOT or kick/pry/et cetera it.  But we seem to be out of puzzles.

AH!  We can LEVER DOOR WITH PICK to open it.  Thanks, CASA walkthrough!  And now we just have to EXIT CAR... no... LEAVE CAR, no, GO DOOR, no... aargh... GET OUT does it!

The biggest issue I had with Snow Joke, as I have reported with some other PAWS games, is that LOOK, SEARCH and EXAMINE are not synonyms, nor are they consistently used from game to game, and in this case the parser tends to respond with You can't do that when what it really means is, "That's not the word the designer has in mind."  The puzzles are not difficult at all, but the parser wrestling is a pain.  If this were a longer game, I'd have more to complain about, but the time passed quickly enough given the simple objective at hand.  It was a pleasant enough way to spend a snowy evening.

At Random: Solar Jetman (NES, 1990)

Another random pick, another Nintendo Entertainment System with a pointless and long-forgotten subtitle mentioned only on the packaging: Solar Jetman - Hunt for the Golden Warpship, developed by Rare and published by Tradewest in 1990.  And it's a really good game!

Unbeknownst to most US gamers, Solar Jetman was actually a sequel to Jetpac and Lunar Jetman, popular on the UK scene via the Sinclair Spectrum computer (and a few other platforms) but relatively unknown here until Rare's 2007 XBLA update, Jetpac Refuelled, which provided my own introduction to this classic 1980s series.

As a result, Solar Jetman is an unusual NES game -- it has the slower, more deliberate pacing of an 8-bit home computer title, sprites are small but smoothly animated, and the action depends heavily on simulated physics.  The player pilots a probe ship exploring a series of alien planets, seeking out fuel, upgrade parts, and parts of the fabled Golden Warpship, with tongue-in-cheek names:

There are bonus power crystals to pick up as well, and a variety of roaming enemies and fixed gun emplacements to take out with the probe's front-mounted guns.  Once we've collected all the key items on a planet, we're off to the next one.  But this is easier said than done; if the probe takes too much damage, it blows up.  Still, our Jetpac-wearing pilot ejects and has a chance to survive if we can make it back to our landing ship in one piece -- with the added bonus that human lives are the limit, not probes, so if we succeed we can continue with a new probe and no major setbacks.  Fortunately, any enemy turrets we have destroyed stay that way -- wandering aliens will regenerate, but we can actually clean out the caverns before we tackle the tough stuff.

Solar Jetman's challenge lies in the navigation and collecting mechanic -- our probe is subject to gravity and physics, so we must use a tiny thruster rocket and frequent attitude adjustments to get where we're trying to go.  It's like playing the classic Lunar Lander game without the fuel limits, but with a bunch of enemies and landscapes making life difficult.  And once we pick up an item with the probe's tow cable, the additional weight and inertia make the going even trickier -- reaching any kind of vertical speed with a wildly swaying, heavy item attached is a true challenge.

Of course, the struggle is usually worth it -- returning the piece shown above to our mothership during the first level produces a very valuable upgrade:

The shields are very handy, but not as handy as they first appear -- we can't use the tow cable while the shields are up, so while it's easier to find our cargo with shields on, it's just as hard to make off with it.  Returning these FUEL icons to our landing ship makes the Jetpac lineage clear (my probe ship is within/behind the landing ship in this screenshot):

The rules change up a bit when we enter special chambers where gravity is not an issue, but we must master a new challenge, as the piece of the Golden Warpship we've discovered tends to float around wildly, attracted to the entry portal as well as the exit portal, forcing us to battle against conflicting vectors to deliver it to its destination.

Discovering a piece of the Warpship takes us into a brief challenge round, where we must try to collect crystals before time runs out.  I imagine this next screen's reference made absolutely no sense to American gamers -- see, the original Jetpac and Lunar Jetman inspired to a comic strip in the Spectrum-oriented gaming magazine Crash, drawn by John Richardson and called Jetman.  Even though it was officially sponsored by Rare, the strip was a freewheeling parody, with Richardson applying Wally Wood/Harvey Kurtzman-esque art to the adventures of "The Looney" (Looney Jetman, get it?)  Thus, our bonus round efforts are rewarded with this head-scratching reference to the Federation of Space Loonies:

On my first round I only just made it to the second planet, of a reported thirteen, and I didn't have much virtual cash to spend when the opportunity to purchase additional upgrades presented itself before we proceeded to the next location.  A substantial portion of cartridge memory must have been devoted to these between-level landing displays:

The going gets more difficult here on Mexomorf, and it wasn't long before I was facing the inevitable:

 

 

Solar Jetman was a very pleasant surprise -- it's a solid game that rewards practice and patience, and it's a breath of fresh air on a platform crowded with frantic scrolling shooters and platformers.  It's more complicated than Jetpac, perhaps unnecessarily so, and the controls take some time to master, but the effort is worth it -- nothing feels as good as swinging around a rock outcropping, bumping around a little while we take out a few nearby enemies, dropping the shields, grabbing the critical cargo and fighting gravity to get it back to the ship.  The set-your-own pacing and vector mechanics make Solar Jetman a different sort of challenge in the NES library, and I really enjoyed my brief time with it.

At Random: Xevious (NES, 1988)

Another random grab comes up with a somewhat prescient NES cartridge -- toy company Bandai published this 8-bit console adaptation of video game developer Namco's 1982 coin-op, Xevious, nearly 25 years before the two companies merged to form today's Namco Bandai.  The North American packaging insisted on calling the game Xevious The Avenger, but the game itself has no truck with such hogwash:

Xevious' biggest innovation at the time of its release was its newfangled graphics hardware that allowed display of a detailed scrolling background independent of the sprites, on a separate plane that created a convincing illusion of above-the-ground depth.  This is something we take for granted today, and it could be taken for granted on the 8-bit Famicom, so this port didn't push the hardware too seriously.  But in 1982 arcades, it was quite an impressive sight to see roads and hills of the world below in a space shoot-'em-up, rather than the customary empty or sparsely star-speckled vacuum of space.

Xevious ports fairly smoothly to the Nintendo Entertainment System -- the music sounds fine, though the sound effects aren't as rich; whether it's a plus or not, the simple music cuts out when certain sound effects are playing, just like the coin-op original.  The background looks just a little bit chunkier than the coin-op, shoehorning the original graphic layouts into the NES' more limited tile palette.  The sprites come over with some loss of color but good detail and minimal flicker, and the two buttons on the controller satisfy the arcade game's need for separate shoot and bomb buttons.  Unlike some NES versions of arcade games, this is a straightforward replication of the coin-op, with no added storylines or features, and just like the coin-op there's really no end to it -- the landscape just recycles at a higher level of difficulty if we manage to make it all the way through.

I had no hope it making it all the way through, or anywhere close.  I've quite honestly never been very good at Xevious, or Dragon Spirit, or any other Namco shooter that involves bombing and shooting simultaneously -- I tend to ignore the ground based targets unless they're shooting at me, treating them as innocuous background imagery, and when I finally turn my attention to bombing ground targets I start running smack into airborne enemies.  So I tend not to get very far at all before I reach the inevitable:

Even with a Game Genie code granting infinite lives, the game remains challenging, as we don't pick up immediately where we left off with a new life -- we are set back to a checkpoint, and must successfully fight our way to the next invisible boundary to make progress.  I did manage to get to the first mothership with such a cheat, though I didn't fare particularly well -- I managed to bomb the mothership's central port, expecting the incoming missiles to cease, which they did not.  I include this screenshot of my imminent demise because the largeish (albeit immobile) enemy is one of Xevious' trademark images, and because the blocky road system near the bottom of the screen clearly depicts the tile-mapping challenge in fitting this onto the NES:

Xevious' advancements were largely audiovisual in 1982 -- the gameplay is challenging but not particularly adventurous, and as a result it doesn't hold up nearly as well as Galaga or even Space Invaders today.  Later games like the Raiden series presented similar ideas with more pizzazz, making Xevious feel like a necessary but dated technology step.

But it must have been popular in its time, as Nintendo released an emulated version for the Game Boy Advance as part of an NES Classics series, and has also made this NES port available on the Wii's Virtual Console.  It's a little odd when one considers the original arcade coin-op game would run just as well on these platforms, but nostalgia has its appeal, and it seems more people played Xevious on the NES than in the arcade.

At Random: Robocop (NES, 1989)

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie Robocop remains a classic of its type -- low-budget production values boosted by sardonic dark humor, interesting sci-fi concepts and shamelessly over-the-top violence.  The UK home computer software company Ocean Software Limited snagged the game license early on, subletting the rights to Data East for a coin-op arcade game, which was then in turn hybridized with Ocean's home versions to produce Data East's cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989.

The arcade game was a straightforward late-80s shoot-'em-up -- as Robocop, the player generally had to walk from left to right, shooting various thugs and mechanical enemies including the famous ED-209 attack droid.  It was a short experience, about 20 minutes judging from available YouTube videos, designed to suck quarters with its detailed sprites and animation.

The home version took a different tack -- while it borrowed numerous visual elements from the coin-op, it spread them out across multiple levels and added a degree of exploration and treasure hunting.  It also sacrificed some elements beyond the capabilities of the NES, and made some odd design choices of its own.

The game is standard NES platforming action fare, aside from the 250 lb. cybernetic law enforcement officer's inability to jump.  And the controls are a little bit odd -- the arcade game equipped Robocop with a gun at all times, but the home version limits our access to firepower.  The very beginning of the game plays like a beat-'em-up, as Robocop strolls along the street facing various punching and kicking enemies, punching them in return; we can (awkwardly) use the Select button to block enemy attacks if our punches aren't doing the job.  The AI is also strange, as some enemies seem to be thrown into a situation they don't want to be in.  On occasion we see kicking thugs run in from the right side, leap over Robocop's metal-encased head, and run off on the left side, making no serious attempt to attack.

Eventually, at a point that's completely arbitratry except in the designer's vision, Robocop is able to stop and take out his sidearm from the holster built into his right leg.  I'd guess he's trying to avoid doing any damage with friendly fire, except that Robocop's prime directive #2,"Protect the Innocent," is almost immediately violated when the next batch of enemies we encounter include a number of dogs to shoot:

The arcade game's first level ends with a street confrontation with the famous ED-209 Enforcement Droid that ends in a standoff, but the NES version pits Officer Murphy against a bizarrely dressed tough in a warehouse.  Our bullets are apparently no good against his somewhat haphazardly applied erotic body armor, so we have to take a more humane approach to law enforcement, i.e., punching him in the face until he dies:

The second level feels more like a home video game, as we enter a mansion where we can explore offices and spare rooms to find additional weapons.  We also have to figure out how to climb stairs -- the controls aren't much help here, and I usually ended up wandering back and forth on the bottom landing, trying to hit an upward/diagonal combination on the D-pad until finally I got somewhere.  It can be done!

Unfortunately, it seems like most of the imagination and cartridge space invested in this design went into the first level -- it's colorful and arcade-like, with plenty of challenge.  As we get into the next section, we start seeing the same enemies again.  And the graphics become repetitive and dull-looking, with lots of grays and blues that we're already seeing a lot of in our hero.  And with the NES' spare horsepower running low, the challenge starts to depend on the clock more than the enemies -- I wrapped up this second or third attempt by exploring too many nooks and crannies and thus running out of time, though I had plenty of health left over:

Robocop falls pathetically to his knees, keeling halfway over as his systems apparently seize up, presumably to keep his hard drive intact, and the bad guys are free to run rampant in Old Detroit.

I'd had enough fun at this point, so while I was not seriously discouraged either, I opted not to challenge again.  Data East's Robocop is one of those 8-bit licensed platformers that we're not likely to see re-released, due to licensing considerations, but it's not a major loss either -- I wouldn't mind seeing its arcade progenitor show up on a compilation somewhere, but this version hasn't aged well.

Adventure of the Week: Merry Christmas (1984)

As luck would have it, this week's Tuesday falls on Christmas Day, so it seems entirely appropriate to tackle a very brief illustrated adventure called Merry Christmas.  This was a promotional giveaway game put out by the Australian publisher Melbourne House for the Commodore 64 during the 1984 holiday season; it doesn't take long at all to play, as long as we can avoid getting lost in the snowy wastes surrounding Santa's workshop.  The player must assist Father Christmas in preparing for his physically improbable delivery rush; Grahame Willis did the programming, with graphics by 'Rusty' Rankin and animation by David Johnston.

As is often the case with these early games, we ironically have rampant C-64 piracy to thank for preserving this title in the online archives, though as this was not really a "for sale" title perhaps its illicit circulators can be forgiven:

Normally I suggest that readers play these games for themselves before reading my comments, but this one is extremely straightforward, with just a few locations and puzzles that scarcely deserve the name.  It may not be worth your while to get it up and running -- I had to try a couple of Commodore 64 emulators before I got it working, though I should have just remembered past lessons and stuck with VICE from the get-go.  There's not much to spoil here, but for the sake of formatting consistency I will pretend there are surprise-ruining...

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

We begin outside Santa's workshop at the north pole, as a charming (though endless and eventually tiresome) C64 rendition of "Jingle Bells" plays as an animated Santa walks out of his workshop.  A snowman stands near a sign that suggests digging in the snow is fun and rewarding; this doesn't look like it's going to be a particularly difficult adventure.  DIG SNOW yields a small key, which can be used to UNLOCK DOOR and enter the workshop.  The snowman is missing a nose, so we'll probably need to fix that before we're through here.

The snowy fields surrounding Santa's workshop are a maze; the game helpfully tells us if we've been to a location before, but it's hard to map until we've picked up a few more inventory items from inside the workshop.  We can DIG SNOW in one location to find the snowman's nose, though I forgot to do anything with it after I found it, and for some reason we can't simply walk back out of the workshop the way we came in, so we'll have to see if we can find our way back there later.

The workshop features a pile of elf-made toys.  Santa's sleigh is parked to the east, half-full of toys; a red jacket hangs nearby, and if we GET JACKET (TAKE is not recognized) and EXAMINE POCKET we find a silver whistle.  Like many early graphic adventures with text parsers, some objects are depicted by the artist but not recognized -- there are clearly some boots standing near the wall, but I don't know the word: BOOTS.  EXCLUSIVE JOKE FOR U.K. READERS:  I wonder if W.H. Smith's paid Melbourne House some sort of anti-product placement fee?

South of the workshop is another pile of toys and some letters to Santa, plus a book with a flashing star on the front that fulfills this game's primary purpose by promoting other Melbourne House titles, including holiday favorites like Castle of Terror and Grand Larceny:

We can READ LETTERS to find a boy's request for a cricket bat and ball.  Another letter requests a cricket bat and a dollhouse.  We don't actually have two cricket bats on hand -- Santa's inventory control systems seem to be rather haphazard -- so we'll assume the letters we are reading are from the same family and they can share one.  We can pick up a sack here and put the toys in it -- GET BAT, PUT BAT IN SACK, then GET DOLLHOUSE, PUT DOLLHOUSE IN SACK, then GET BALL and... ahem.  I didn't find a letter requesting the stuffed cat toy, but it disappeared after I filled the rest of the "orders" so there may be some randomness here.

We can return to the sleigh garage to PUT SACK IN SLEIGH, and everything is now ready for toy delivery


North of the workshop, we can look out the window (over a lazy elf's shoulder) to see Santa's reindeer flying around with his sleigh in tow, apparently in a holding pattern.  We can OPEN WINDOW and GO WINDOW, to find ourselves back in the snowy maze, through which we must navigate to find our way back to the entrance of the workshop.

While we're there, we can PUT NOSE ON SNOWMAN -- he puts it on and smiles, and then his nose falls off again, to be lost in the snow forever; DIG SNOW produces only cold hands at this point.  Rather a depressing Christmas tale, that!

BLOW WHISTLE out front calls the reindeer in for a landing -- we can't GO SLEIGH, but we can GET IN SLEIGH.  And we don't have to worry about actually delivering these toys -- FLY SLEIGH takes us to a quick victory!  (Apparently the reindeer are towing the sleigh with the toys in it, even if we saw them flying around outside before we put the sack in the parked sleigh indoors.) 

There's just time for one final promotional message from Melbourne House, looking forward to the company's 1985 lineup:

The parser stays awake afterwards, though we can't navigate anywhere.  I'm not sure where I picked it up, but my inventory contained an oordo felves at this point that could not be referenced in the dictionary; it looks like a bug with door and elves worked into the wrong places somehow, and didn't cause any real problems.

Merry Christmas was clearly a quick little promo effort, but its ephemeral nature is what makes it kind of special and it was just the right length for a quick holiday post. 

And I wish Happy Holidays to all of you, dear readers!

At Random: Tennis (NES, 1983)

I'm working my way randomly through my backlog of NES cartridges, and the process is going fairly smoothly because most of these games don't contain excessive amounts of bloggable content.  Today's pick, Nintendo's Tennis, bears a 1983 copyright -- it was one of the early Famicom titles, and it became a staple of the Nintendo Entertainment System's launch lineup in the US.  The title screen opens with the same sporting fanfare musical theme used for several of Nintendo's 8-bit sports games; there's no in-game music, just the sounds of running feet, bouncing tennis balls and swinging racquets.

There's not a lot to say about Tennis, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game.  It was one of the most playable sports titles on the NES, and despite some fancier, more "realistic" tennis games released later in the system's life, it did a fine job of holding its favor with players until the SNES' Super Tennis came along and did very much the same thing with better audiovisuals.

Activision's Alan Miller pioneered true (beyond Pong) videogame tennis on the Atari 2600, making the game playable in pseudo-3-D by adding a shadow to the ball, allowing the player to judge height and position in relation to the court.  Nintendo's take on the game retains this critical visual cue, augmenting it with ball sprites of different sizes to communicate distance and altitude as well.  The controls are tuned to be forgiving to a degree -- similar to Wii Sports' Tennis event, we don't have to have pixel-perfect placement and timing to return the ball, but we have to be pretty close; when we miss a return, we know we were standing in the wrong spot and/or swinging at the wrong time. 

While there's no real swing control beyond timing, all of the standard tennis strategies are effectively supported -- we can slam the ball just over the net, try to send it just within bounds from a more distant position, or send it high into the air to make it more difficult for our opponent to judge its location.

I've played the NES version a fair amount over the years, but my favorite memories of Nintendo's Tennis actually come from its VS. system coin-op incarnation, where two players could actually play against each other.  The NES version allows a singles or doubles game, but the computer always occupies the upper court, so humans can only play cooperatively.  This makes sense, as the game would be rather hard to play from the upper-court perspective; it's much easier to judge the ball when it's coming toward the player.  But I miss the one-on-one competition the VS. system allowed, with a separate display for each player.

And of course, Mario himself takes on the first of many cameo roles, playing referee for the match.  The best part is that we can step outside the court far enough to almost (but not quite) take a swing at him when we're unhappy with his calls, making for memorably hilarious freeze-frame moments:

Nintendo's Tennis was an early title that still holds up pretty well -- it has been superseded by more realistic and/or active games on modern consoles, but there's a lot to be said for well-tuned simplicity.

Of Import: Atlantis no Nazo (Famicom, 1986)

Since I've been playing a lot of NES games lately, I thought I should stick with the platform's Japanese cousin for this round of import gaming.  Sunsoft published global 8-bit Nintendo console hits like Blaster Master and Batman, but their early home system output included unassuming titles like Atlantis no Nazo, published in 1986 for the Famicom and never released in North America.  This title screen references Sunsoft's parent company, Sun Electronics Corporation:

Atlantis no Nazo ("Mystery of Atlantis") is a fast-paced, simple but not overly easy platformer that sends a pith-helmeted man through a series of short, scrolling zones.  He can jump about three times his own height, and throw small bombs to take out enemies willing to sit still long enough to be knocked out that way.  Most of the challenge comes from the time pressure -- we have to get from each level's entry to an exit doorway before the rapidly ticking timer runs out.

The game's biggest weakness is a general blandness -- the music rarely changes and the color palette is similarly static.  The game occupies a relatively tiny 48K cartridge, and while the backgrounds and enemies are refreshed on occasion, many of the level layouts are repetitive and predictable.  The first zone sends our hero across a flat landscape -- all we have to do is dodge some incoming birds, and their, erm, air-to-surface missiles:

Note an early use of the standard Japanese video game iconography for animal droppings -- somehow this bird manages to repeatedly disgorge output nearly as large as itself.  Birds fly by at only two heights -- up high, indicating we must dodge the poo, and at face-height, where we can jump or duck.

The second zone is different in style but still straightforward -- we have to climb around some rocks, bombing shell-armored enemies who are only vulnerable while moving:

And zone 3 challenges us to make some tricky jumps while avoiding flying fish (a la Super Mario Bros.) and more of the molluscs from zone 2:

The design does make a few attempts to be more adventurous in its layout -- if we fall down certain gaps in Zone 3, we are taken to Zone 6, a spooky graveyard scene where we must dodge bat guano instead of bird poo:

Zone 6 leads, oddly enough, to Zone 8, where we must try to leap across jagged spires and avoid falling into gaps.  I had not figured out how to pick up the apparent boot power-up floating in the air on Zone 6, and thus found myself unable to make certain critical jumps in this level.  There's also no way to return to the previous level to remedy such an error, so my adventure ended here:

If we skip the first exit to Zone 1, and use a bomb to blow open the next door we see, we can jump straight to Zone 11... but it's a lot like Zone 8, as the limited cartridge capacity starts to reveal its weaknesses:

Note that there's not really much we can do here -- we can grab two treasure chests, and if we can get ourselves out of the deep pit associated with the leftmost chest, we can bomb the door open to return to Zone 1.

Atlantis no Nazo is not an easy game, despite its simplicity -- we start with a generous 7 lives, but we die if we make contact with an enemy, jump or slip into a fatal gap, allow the level timer to reach zero, or foolishly drop explosives at our explorer's feet.  When we're out of lives, the game is unceremoniously over, displaying the player's final score and number of treasure chests collected, with no continues, and no indication of whether we've made a good or bad showing:

Early games for any console are always interesting to evaluate -- the Famicom was around long enough to see considerable growth and improvement in its library, and Atlantis no Nazo is more of a curiosity than a classic.  Still, it's challenging and non-linear enough to make it a worthy challenge for platform game fans, and a forerunner of better titles from Sunsoft just a few years down the road.