Leger vs. Double Dragon (Amiga)

Considering the importance of Double Dragon released by Technos back in 1987, how influential it was, when looking at the beat 'em up genre it feels like quite the sad affair seeing it in action on the Amiga.

Developed by Binary Design 1989 was the year that Amiga owners could get hold of their very own copy of what already had become a classic.

While the actual stages look at least somewhat decent and quite similar to the arcade originals, the characters have lost pretty much all of their ooomph; Few details, colours and presented with quite stiff animation.

But you have the kick, the punch, the elbow quickly put into the face of an enemy sneaking up from behind, the jump, the throw and the kick while jumping. And if you feel like it there is always the occasional whip or bat to pick up and smash into whomever you feel like smashing.

Actually, Double Dragon on the Amiga might initially give the impression of playing better than it looks (it has got the co-op, woohoo!). The low difficulty makes up for the iffy collision detection, but upon reaching the final stage everything falls into pieces.

Trying to get past the spear wielding statues showcases how utterly broken the game actually is, draining most (if not all) lives and continues unless being extremely lucky.

But luck should not be a factor to take into consideration in a context like this.

Just like a really low quality sample of the title theme, being played until starting the game, should not be all the music you get since the actual gameplay just spews out some sounds of hits and people sounding like they are puking while dying.

Oh, dear.

 

Leger vs. Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 (Amiga)

Considering Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 being famous partly because of its by now classic soundtrack one may find it rather musicless.

Not to the point of the iconic intro being nothing but a perfect example of what the Amiga experience sounded like to many, or the short but mood defining track themes not managing to exactly what they set out to do.

Because it is, and they do.

But removing the car stereo was a bold move, only leaving the sounds of driving and interacting with the environment and objects therein.

I am almost surprised that it does not bother me, but it is not like Lotus 2 goes silent or fails to engage by not hosting a pumping soundtrack to driving.

Honestly, Lotus 2 released in 1991 is such a different experience to its precursor from previous year that it seems remarkable that it still manages to feel like a logical step forward in the series.

One reason for things working out as good as they do could be that the changes made seems to originate in aspects of the previous game that could be questioned.

Like having reduced the obviousness of the lack of artificial intelligance where cars while still pingponging from side to side do this in a much less annoying and apparent manner.

Or the fact that not only one third of the screen (or half of it in 60 Hz) is used for racing... but two thirds (or the entire screen if run in 60 Hz).

Another change is that one no longer is racing for first place, but instead need to reach the goal before time runs out with checkpoints every now and then bumping up the time limit somewhat.

Progress can now be saved with the help of a password to each new track reached (forget about chasing high scores if using passwords, though).

Gone is also the need for using a pit stop to refill fuel and the choice of three different levels of difficulty (with each higher difficulty offering new and more stages) is thrown out the window.

Now all there is is eight different tracks, each throwing something new into the mix aswell as ramping up the difficulty in a much more well balanced way than in Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.

From an ordinary track without much fuzz, through nighttime driving, dealing with fog on really thin roads, a snowstorm making things slippery, putting the tires on sand, avoiding stumbling over to the wrong side of a motorway or sinking down in a swamp making things move at a snails pace.

It seems easy to understand why Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 is one of the most fondly remembered racers on the Amiga, because everything just feels like it falls into place.

The production is more or less flawless, each and every track feels memorable, the graphics have been somewhat updated, the cars are way more varied in colour, the punishment for crashing into stuff have been greatly reduced (so much that at times it may be a good idea to use an obstacle on the side of the road to ricochet back on track if one seems to get stuck in an unfortunate placement bringing shit almost to a halt.

Everything just seem to have a better flow to it, even if the framerate seldom reaches the same heights as in the precursor, and the combined competitive and co-op play have extended the number of possible simultaneous players from two to four (still making things somewhat easier by letting the game go on as long as any player reaches the goal in time).

Looking for things to complain about, besides the lack of in-game music while driving, one could mention the almost ridicilous difficulty of the eight, and final, track in the game.

Leaving almost no room for errors, I have yet not managed to even pass the very first checkpoint, it at least feels doable.

The ai, while way much pleasant than last time, could have done with some tweaking and of course one can complain about the lack of difficulty settings aswell as ask for more stages.

But, in the end, it just seems like nitpicking stuff in a package that feels complete and more or less perfect as it is.

Leger vs. Kid Gloves (Amiga)

As a one man project, with some sound help from Mr. Whittaker, Timothy Closs have managed to deliver both a simple looking, almost ugly to be honest, but extremely addictive little platformer.

Obviously inspired by ZX Spectrum classics, such as Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy, the extremely pixel perfectness required to get pretty much anywhere in Kid Gloves screen flipping adventure might turn people off.

But, persistence is key and with it comes learning, developing strategies and getting friends with the ruthlessly stiff controls.

At times you actually do not have more than a single pixel to work with, as a matter of life and death thing, but luckily most obstacles can be dealt with in a rather safe way.

See, spending time on a single screen makes things happen. One thing at a time, such as enemies appearing or walls disappearing. Taking out enemies is seldom a hard thing to do, as long as one is strategically placed somehwere where projectiles may reach the baddies.

Rushing through things most often result in disaster, and since no more than two projectiles (bouncing around the screen for a while until hitting something nasty) can be active at the same time planning the attacks is a necessary thing to do.

And, no, not everything can be killed.

Making things more complex is a simple shop where some few beefier weapons can be bought aswell as extra lives, bombs, keys and magic.

Bombs clear out all the killable enemies on the screen, magic delivers a random kind of effect (such as slowing down time, transforming dangerous objects into pickupable fruits and such the like) and keys removes certain otherwise unpassable objects.

It will quickly be rather obvious that keys are really scarce, and so is money, and it is very much possible to make choices that fucks everything up so nothing more than starting all over seems like the only option.

Hence, the puzzle ascpect comes into place. Not really much more complex than having to consider in which order to do what, but it is there to be dealt with.

Kid Gloves might seem like a really hard game, at first.

But, by repeated tries and thought through strategies used it will sooner or later seem perfectly possible to beat all the 40 screens covering four different environments (in time, yeah... the Kid Gloves seem to make time travelling possible, to some kind of uncontrollable extent).

Not to ignore the fact that there is one quite fatal flaw: Climbing, or rather, getting hold of things to climb during a jump can be annoyingly hard. Considering a few screens almost demands you to do pixel perfect jumps, and grabbing something to climb while doing so, this can almost break the game completely.

If you do not find ways around this issue, or use magic to turn the hasards below the climbable things into fruit.

Oh.

Still... a rather lovely little game, this is.

If you allow it to be.

It will most certainly take some time to get to grips with how to play, how to think, and to finally reach some of the later stages.

And it would not have hurt the slightest if the graphics would have been somewhat more pleasing on the eyes or the different environments having had theme songs played during gameplay.

But, anyways...

Leger vs. Ys 3: Wanderers from Ys (Mega Drive)

It might be that Ys 4: Mask of the Sun on the Super Nintendo was mentioned in the Swedish Nintendo Magasinet at one point or another, together with a picture making it obvious that what I had learned from Ys: The Vanished Omens on the Master System a couple of years earlier still had some relevance.

But if so, I did not make much of it. Not really registering the info, because if I had things would probably have played out in another way.

Considering many sequels at the time took things in completely different directions, not to mention Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link (switching from mainly adventuring in an overhead perspective to spending most time platforming and battling in a side scrolling context) or Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest (dropping the linearity and inplementing some light rpg elements), what I was about to realise should not have come as a surprise.

But it did.

Emulation had to be a thing, and internet at home aswell, until actually getting in contact with the PC-Engine, or TurboGrafx-16 as known in the west.

As Ys on the Master System had been an experience above and beyond the usual much thanks to the soundtrack, the somewhat odd battle system where the red haired hero Adol runs into enemies to hurt them and the few but huge places to visit (with the final tower making up almost a third of the playtime of the entire game), this to me previously unknown version on CD blew me away.

Studio produced music, simple but really nice looking animated cut scenes, two smaller games turned into one big and with that a continuation of a game I loved.

The sequel never reached the Master System.

Nor did the third and fourth game in the series, with this particular third one doing a Zelda 2 and dropping the overhead perspective for simple but effective action and platforming.

A black sheep, of sorts, some will still claim. Except it really is not.

Not even considering the full blown 3D remake released as a follow up to the rebirth of the series, with the now somewhat classic The Ark of Napisthim, The Oath in Felghana, while radically different from Wanderers from Ys, is an excellent game but partly because the game it is a remake of already did many things right.

So, what about this Wanderers from Ys then?

Keeping in line with the prequels few but huge places to visit still is a thing. No more than one small town acting as a hub of sorts between the map and the other places to explore.

Two shops, few people to interact with and not that much of a large selection of equipment and items to buy or find. The concept of less is more is put at work here, flawlessly, because it makes it easy to feel that everything is of relevance.

Even the simple story, no matter how predictable it actually is. Falcom just hits a sweet spot where the most one dimensional of a character manages to feel important in a bigger context, but this was just as true in the first two Ys games. And, no matter what anyone says, Adol and his blue haired companion of always, Dogi, do very much seem like a couple even if not seemingly realising it themselves. But they often do, nothing new here.

Progressing the story, reaching new places aswell as opening up new paths in places already explored are all things happening in an experience with a high tempo; Wanderers of Ys is a short game, some few hours long, but it never seems to be lacking content wise and it seems almost impossible to get stuck not knowing what to do next.

Having a hard time with a boss the solution seldom is further away than finding or buying some new eqpuipment or going grinding for a short period of time. Boss battles are rather chaotic at times, thus while learning patterns may be enough to progress as long as Adol is strong enough to deal damage to whatever creature he is fighting one never have to feel stuck because of a lack of options of making things easier.

Adol can find rings that consumes magic power while being used, granting him more stenght, defense or the ability to slow down the flow of time, aswell as use herbs to restore health or even cheating death under certain circumstances with the help of a special object.

Fighting, while not keeping in line with this thing with running into enemies in previous games (aswell as in the fourth game in the series), is so fluent that it almost feels like the battle system of old. Adol swings his sword at a ridicilously fast pace (especially while trying to hit enemies passing above his head) and it is never more complicated than beating up the enemies while avoiding other kind of physical contact.

Physically interacting with enemies or their weapons, if not having good enough protection, may result in death in a second or two. The life drains away just as quickly as Adol swings his sword.

While the environments thematically are somewhat generic (caves, castles, snowy mountains and a burning inferno), they do look fantastic much thanks to the details.

Being too familiar with the huge graphics of many 16-bit games the small blocks, 8 by 8 pixels, used here to build the world gives everything a seriously nice 8-bit look with a touch of paralax (which the PC-Engine version handles horribly bad), more colours (the SNES version looks drab in comparation) and small things worth noticing everywhere.

The look is, of course, partly due to the 1989 origin of the game being released on the PC-8801 8-bit computer by NEC.

Oh, and the developers have, as expected when it comes to most things Ys related, done a ridicilously good job with turning the music of Falcom Sound Team JDK into something that sounds like it is working with the hardware and not against it.

Electronic, intense and melodic, and maybe one of the best soundtracks the entire series has to offer even it could be discussed to no end which version of the soundtrack in question one prefers.

Thing is, playing through Ys 3: Wanderers from Ys is a blast from start to end, no matter things that could have been designed differently. Everything just falls into place, such a smooth ride, and while it differs quite much from the rest of the games in the series it very much nails the classic Ys feel of the early games down to the classic jingle played when opening a chest.

If I had played this when it was new, it would not have taken me this long to appreciate it for what it is, as much as I do. I would have been more open to it approaching things in a different way, just like The Adventure of Link and Simon's Quest.

Not that I ever have disliked it.

It is just that as of today I love it.