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Adventures of Lolo

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:47:55 +0000

Adventures of Lolo

The Switch's selection of old NES games is pretty small right now, but it's worth it to play some games that I maybe hadn't spent as much time as I would have liked to have when the NES was new, but it's also a good way to play old NES games without having to fiddle around with an old NES (although, I'm still trying to figure out how to hook up my NES Advantage to the Switch for the best possible experience). I saw not too long ago that a game that I almost completely forgot about, Adventures of Lolo, made the cut and was available to play, so I sat down to play it for the first time in... A while.

If you don't know, Adventures of Lolo is a puzzle game where you have to guide Lolo through a series of rooms full of (mostly) sleeping monsters, 'heart framers', 'emerald framers', and a chest containing a jewel. Collecting the jewel clears the monsters from the level and lets you move to the next room. Collecting the heart framers opens the chest and also gives Lolo some limited magic powers (usually just the ability to turn a monster into an egg and push it around a little), and pushing the emerald framers does nothing exciting, but by careful planning, you can use them to safely navigate around the monsters once they've awoken. It's usually better to see it in action rather than trying to explain it.

The first time I played Adventures of Lolo I didn't do so well. Sure, I had read all about it in my worn-out copy of How To Win at Nintendo Games, but just reading dry descriptions of the levels and their solutions didn't really stick in my mind very well, and I was a kid with no patience who spent two bucks to rent this game for an evening, so I really wanted to make it through this thing before having to take it back to the store. I don't remember how far I actually got, but it was a far cry from the end (and the scrap of paper I used to record my password on is lost to the mists of time). I took it back to the rental shop and didn't really think about it again for a long time.

I played it again once or twice during retro-game parties during my college years, but didn't really make much progress there, either, since I was more interested in playing games that I was actually good at. And, I again forgot all about it for a long time. Until last week, in fact, when I turned on my Switch and saw that it had been added to my list of complimentary NES games on their Old Games (and also you can play online) Service. I decided to give it another shot and see how far I could make it this time, fully expecting that I would play it for a few minutes, give up, and then go look at something else for a while.

I solved the first few puzzles easily enough (which is great, since they're supposed to be pretty easy). I then got to some harder puzzles that, after thinking about them for a few minutes, was able to clear. Then some more. And then some more. I'm not sure exactly how far I ever made it in this game as a kid, but I started seeing levels I didn't recognize after a while, so I knew I got past whatever point it was. And I kept going.

Over the course of two nights and about three hours, I was able to finish all of the levels, defeat the demon king, and rescue Lolo's girlfriend/sister/whatever she is.

So, was the game easier for me now that I have something like 30 years' more experience playing video games? Was it easier for me to sit down and concentrate since I no longer had the looming deadline of having to finish the game right now since it goes back tomorrow? Or is it something else entirely? I'll probably never know, since I'm most likely not going to think about it too much after I publish this. I'm more interested in finding some more old puzzlers that I was terrible at and seeing if I'm any better at those now.

b Wed, 01/16/2019 - 13:47

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Yoshi's Cookie

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 12:27:16 +0000

Yoshi's Cookie

Yoshi's Cookie is a weird game. Not because it takes place in a bakery of some kind and has you matching rows and columns of cookies in order to eliminate them. Mostly it's weird because a game called "Yoshi's Cookie" barely has Yoshi in it at all.

If you've never played Yoshi's Cookie, it's kind of hard to describe. You have a playfield with some amount of cookies in it, and rows and columns of cookies float in from the top and side of the screen respectively. You can pick an arbitrary cookie that's already landed and scroll the row from side to side or you can scroll the column you're in up and down. The idea is to get either a row or a column that stretches completely from one side to another or from the top to the bottom. do that, and they get removed from the playfield (I guess to get packaged up somewhere?). The further you get, the faster the cookies fly in from the sides of the screen, and the easier it is to make a mistake. Fill up the playfield with your incompetence, er, cookies, and the game ends.

Like a lot of puzzle games at the time, every time you complete 10 rounds you get to take a break and are treated to a barely animated cutscene that has very little to do with the game, and then it's back to sorting cookies.

Until I got a copy a few months ago (thanks, eBay!), I had only played Yoshi's Cookie one time (I guess that's not strictly true, I rented it one time, but that night I had it, I played it several times), and in the video above, I occasionally look almost competent at it. But Yoshi's Cookie is a hard game for me to get my brain around. Conceptually I know that my cookies are three rows high, and I have three heart-shaped cookies in there somewhere, so all I have to do is to get them aligned so that they're all three in the same column, but by the time I've worked out what I have to do and I get them there, another row has landed and completely fouled up my plans.

And that's the thing about puzzle games like this (and puzzle games in general) is that one mistake is all it takes for your house of cards to fall down, especially if you're not skilled enough to fix the problem quickly (or at all). The well designed puzzle games will let skilled players dig themselves out of the hole they've dug themselves into if they're skillful at it, and they'll let the less skillful players develop the skills to do the same after they've put the time and effort into learning the mechanics of what the game expects them to do. There are other puzzle games that require you to play perfectly because one mistake means you can't solve the puzzle and have to start over, and I guess that's good for a certain subset of people, but I'm not one of those, usually. I like being able to make a mistake and recover from it rather than finding out twenty or so moves later that no matter what I did I was going to render the puzzle unsolvable.

Yoshi's Cookie straddles the line somewhere, I think. If I was better at it, I probably could have solved a lot of the puzzles more quickly than I did here, and the mistakes wouldn't have been as costly. It also gets the blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing when the cookies are flowing quickly and the "hey, you're going to fail soon" alarm is going, which is a weird thing to say about what appears to be a tranquil game about sorting cookies.

But they tried something new here, and even though I'm pretty bad at it, I still enjoy playing it. I, in fact, enjoy doing lots of things I'm bad at, but we can talk about those another time.

b Wed, 09/19/2018 - 07:27

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Yo! Noid

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 14:16:55 +0000

Yo! Noid

The 80's were a weird time for a lot of reasons. Take the Noid, for instance. He's a small guy... creature... thing, who wears a red bunny suit and tries to ruin Domino's pizzas (though some people might say that Domino's ruins their own pizzas because their pet pizza place is better (pizza snobs are weird)). Eventually the Noid somehow became a creature who liked Domino's pizza, or something. I don't recall it ever being fully explained, but the gist of it was that kids seemed to like the thing, and kids also like video games, so some Noid games were created, including one called 'Yo! Noid' for the NES (which is a reskin of a completely unrelated Japanese game, but we can talk about that another time).

The first and only time I ran into Yo! Noid in the 90's was in a Playchoice-10 cabinet at one of my local rental stores. It was so bizarre and different from the games that usually were in those things (mostly some Mario game, Hogan's Alley, Wrecking Crew, and the like) that I had to give it a try.

So, I bummed a quarter, put it in, and... lost immediately.

I didn't have any instructions, really, and even though the game looks really straightforward (because it is), it turns out that the Noid is super fragile. One hit by anything kills him immediately. Stepping in an inch of water also kills him immediately. Put these things together, and it turns out that my quarter was also killed immediately.

I decided that the game was bad and a waste of time and didn't really give it thought again until a few years later when I was at my local used everything store and found a copy for $5. I decided that I'd give it a try, since it had been long enough since I'd played it that I forgot all about it being hot garbage.

I played it some more, and immediately failed again on the first stage, and the whole experience from Green's Video Club came flooding back to me. But, I have essentially unlimited quarters now, and the experience of thousands of hours of gameplay to bolster my skills. And... I still failed on the first stage. A lot. After a few tries, I was able to reach the end of Stage 1 and see what lies ahead after all this time. It turns out that Stage 2 is also full of instant death (just add water), and I, again, failed immediately.

I may never defeat Mr. Green and save the city (that looks oddly like an amusement park for some reason), but at least I know that I'm now better at this game than my 11-year-old self, and that's got to count for something, right?

b Wed, 09/12/2018 - 09:16

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Ice Climber

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 15:00:18 +0000

Ice Climber

A long time ago (in video game years, at least) I got a call from my mom during Summer Break. One of her coworkers was apparently getting rid of some NES games that they didn't want, and she wanted to know if I had heard of a game called 'Ice Climbers'. I was a pretty big Nintendo fan... but I hadn't. Since the Internet wasn't really a thing that I had any access to, and since a lot of those old 'black label' NES games were released and out of stores before I got my first NES, it's not super-surprising that I hadn't heard of it. I didn't think much more about it for a lot of years. Until 2002 or so.

That's when Animal Crossing for the GameCube came out. I enjoyed the game well enough, and it was fun to visit my friends' villages and do the in-game stuff (I refused to mess with the clock to make things happen faster, which let me stretch out the fun I got for a lot longer), but what I really liked was the inclusion of a bunch of those 'black label' NES games. The memory card came with one (Mine was Balloon Fight), and you could get a few more by doing certain things in-game (this was before Nintendo realized it could make a lot of money by reselling you their old back catalog over and over and over again, but that's a rant for another day).

Animal Crossing was also compatible with the Nintendo e-Reader. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one on earth that bought one, but it's a device you plug in to your Game Boy Advance, and you can read special codes on special cards that do things in supported games. In Animal crossing, that mostly meant that you could scan a card and you'd get a letter from the animal on the card, which was OK. There were also some mini games you could play for some in-game goodies. I bought a ton of cards and then one day, I got a little something extra

It was an Ice Climber e-Card! There were two games you could unlock this way (and this way only, without resorting to some kind of m4d h4x): this one and Mario Bros. I bought a lot more packs of cards, but never got the other one, or a duplicate of this one.

But, hey! One is pretty good, right? So, I finally got to play the game that I hadn't really thought much about, and hadn't really heard all that much about! That's something, right?

The thing is, though, that the game is not actually very fun. Your Ice Climber has the most bizarre jump mechanics I've ever tried to use, and in a game that's primarily about jumping, that's kind of a problem. For instance, you can't land on platforms like you might expect (apparently you need to make sure that your rear end is touching the platform, if your feet are touching it, they go right through), when you do manage to jump, you go nearly straight up and lose a lot of your forward momentum, and so on.

But the characters endure, somehow, and the game keeps getting (re)re-released on Nintendo's virtual platforms, and in the NES Classic, and the characters keep appearing in Smash Bros., somehow. And, do I regret not picking up that copy all those years ago? No, not really. I only have a physical copy now because I found it for really cheap on eBay. But even with Nostalgia Goggles(tm) on (they're rose-tinted!) this game is terrible, and it's pretty much all due to the wonky controls. But bizarrely bad controls are kind of a staple of old Nintendo games, see also: Balloon Fight, Clu Clu Land, Urban Champion, and a litany of other games that we'll get to eventually.

b Wed, 08/29/2018 - 10:00

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