Palamedes without the manual

Submitted by b on Mon, 06/04/2018 - 12:16

I'm terrible at Palamedes. It's one of those games that I hadn't even really heard of in the NES's heyday, but it kept popping up in lists of Nintendo games that I'd see once in a while. Not that it was ever a Top X game or an X Worst game or anything, it just sort of was there on rarity guides and such, and I never really gave it much thought.

A few years ago, one of our local game trading scam stores went out of business and I picked up two large sacks full of games for not a lot of money, and I grabbed just about everything I could get my hands on that looked fun, and also a copy of Palamedes. And after I verified that it did indeed work and I got it all cleaned up, it kind of sat in my collection for a long time, unplayed. (When I verified that it worked, I powered it on, got to the title screen, watched a demo, and then turned it off, and I didn't go back to it for a really long time for some reason)

But I decided that I'd give it another shot since I had some time, and I hadn't ever really played this game before. But how hard could it be? It has instructions right on the game's label! And the demo demonstrates How to Win!(tm), so it should be a piece of cake!

Palamedes cartridge, with instructions printed right on the label!

But it wasn't.

The game seems straightforward enough. You have a bunch of colored tiles encroaching the bottom of the screen from the top, each color corresponds to a die number. You have a similarly-colored die in your hand and you can change it to whatever color/number that you want. You can then throw it toward the top of the screen. If the color/number matches the one that it hits, then you collect it at the row at the bottom of the screen. The idea is to collect 'hands' for points.

And, I did that. I collected several variations of the hands noted on the label and in the demo... but nothing happened. I eventually lost the game because the puzzle hit the bottom, and I was a little annoyed. I was playing this game according to the instructions, and it wasn't working.

I wasn't recording at the time, but I was able to clear a round one time by making all of the tiles disappear, one at a time (which apparently gives you a decent bonus for doing that) but it's super tedious to do.

So, I went in search of the manual. There are lots of scans of the manual on the ol' Internet here, and lots of writeups at the usual places, and they do tell you that to process the dice that are in your 'hand' you have to press down on the control pad to do it.

With all of the work that Hot B did to make sure that you know how to play, even if the box and manual are long gone (which they are in this case), it's weird to me that they don't mention the tiny, almost insignificant, yet crucially important detail that you have to press the down key on your controller to play this game properly, otherwise you're in for an extremely tedious experience.

Unless you like tedium, I guess. In that case, go for it, and disregard everything I've said here.

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