It’s Retro Week on ugvm! But, it would appear that I’m out almost every night this week. Thank the lord for a spare hour today, and my OneStation. In case you’ve forgotten, the OneStation is a portable Famiclone, not much larger than a Game Boy Micro. Anyway – the games. First up was Pinbot. I was impressed that the ball physics were much better than I was expecting. Most 8-bit pinball titles are pretty poor in this regard, but Pinbot …
Oh! I had everything I needed! All I had to do was show the purple tentacle the police badge, and I had access to the main lab, and Dr. Fred, and the big off switch! Wendy saved, plot foiled, game overed!
So it seems the water from the pool can be given to the plant to make it grow, and by getting one kid caught by Ed you get a few minutes to raid his room. That helped me progress a bit, and I even managed to get the meteor arrested, and have access to the lab! However, I can’t find an envelope (which I think I need to send this demo tape off), and I can’t get into the safe, …
Isn’t the NES great? Well, aside from mine which keeps resetting, anyway. Thank the baby Jesus for my NeoFami, eh? Anyway. This is another point-and-click adventure that I never completed “back in the day”. I thought I’d see how I fared with Man Brains. Interesting Trivia about Maniac Mansion: I first played the game in Germany, on my German exchange partner’s C64. He had it on disk, and it took fourtyeightyteen weeks to load. The best bit, was it was …
Never done that before! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever got further than the Room of Fire With The Firedrake In before now. Mind you, I haven’t played it for probably 10 years or more, so I could be putting down my younger self, intelligence-wise. Some really obtuse puzzles marred it a bit, and the constant burning out of torches (although I found if you don’t die, they last longer) was a pain as I felt rushed, but overall …
I recall that this point-and-click adventure game was hard. Mainly due to the lack of logic in the puzzles, and the try-every-item-on-every-object gameplay. So far, I’ve not been stuck, mainly because I can do some of it from memory. However, I don’t know how to get past the wraith (I thought it was use the slingshot, but no), so I’ve saved for now.
Ah, Rare. Remember them, back when they were good? Before they’d even started work on Kameo, which was about selventyfourten years ago? When they first became Nintendo game developers? Well, this is the sort of thing they wrote. Sadly, this hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Rescue Rangers. It looks fine, and the music and title screen is great and all, but the controls are terrible. Most of this is due to the floaty way the snakes …
Next week on ugvm (the newsgroup, that is) has been designated Retro Week. In preparation, I fished out my NES and some games. This was one of those I decided to try. And, it’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s a standard platformer, but there’s nothing wrong with is so far as I can see. Well, aside from the nasty limited continues and the go-back-to-the-start-of-the-level when you continue thing, but that’s normal for games of this era. I reached the first end …