Finished Powerslave tonight, after about a week’s worth of playing, getting stuck, looking up FAQs and video playthroughs, abusing save states and generally doing my best to change the rules of the game to be in my favor without actually going over the line into the likes of invulnerability codes.

Put simply: If I’d tried playing this game back in 1996, when I bought it, before SSF and youtube and gamefaqs… There’s no bloody way I would have been able to make it through.  It exudes an attitude towards the player that, while not entirely out of place at the time, would come across as actual hatred if it cropped up in a modern game.

You will, the game says, make 8 precision jumps from moving platform to moving platform, high above lava while being bombarded by flying enemies, and if you don’t manage to do it, you’ll be sent back to the start to try again.

Modern games generally don’t do this.

The experience did, however, give me a marvelous sense of perspective.  The next time I’m playing a console game that actually does pull this sort of player abuse, I’m just going to put it aside until whatever console I’m playing it on gets emulated so I can get through it the cheap way.  🙂

Ok, so Powerslave is coming along nicely and I’m starting to feel pretty, what’s a good way to put this? Confident in my ability to turn random aggressive polygon monsters into low-resolution piles of pixelated goo.

So it threw me a tiny curveball.

According to the manual, there are three boss enemies, though I’m expecting a fourth just to spice things up.

The first boss character is in, well, an arena. In getting to him you go through a level that is clearly a funnel – you feel from the onset that you are being lead down a path to your doom, made even more obvious by being dropped into a large circular arena with a giant door on one wall – a door you have to OPEN to let the boss out. It all leads to a nice sense of tension.

Boss #2, on the other hand, is just sort of hanging out in a hallway in its level. There’s no buildup; you’re happily wandering through the level when you turn a corner and BAM.

The ensuing chaos was glorious, going from “huh. Haven’t seen one of those before” to ” huh. It kind of hurts and WOW it’s taking a lot of bullets to kill” to “uh, I’m running kind of low on ammo and close to death, is it ever going to stop and fall over?”

And then, after it was all over – WHAT WAS THAT THING?

Glorious.

I quite like Magic Knight Rayearth – the first TV series, that is; I haven’t seen the sequel or the OVA remake.  It’s got a hella catchy OP song, CLAMP art, Mokona, and one of the biggest I-Did-Not-See-That-Coming plot twists I’ve ever, uh, not seen coming.

I SHOULD be the perfect audience for the video game adaptation, which I’ve owned for over a decade and which I hadn’t yet gotten around to playing until this week.

It turns out that, well, no.  It’s an awfully pretty 2D game, has good BGM, follows the story neatly, and throws in some original characters, but it’s not very fun to play.

I should amend that.  The puzzle solving is fun, and I even rather liked the platforming jumpy bits, but the combat – which, you know, I’m a guy, I like hitting things with sticks – is rather tedious.  You have two characters with swords and one with a bow, and the best strategy in every case is to keep the sword characters on the sidelines and use the bow character for everything, because trying to mix things up in melee is a pain in the arse; it’s hard to get close enough to an enemy to hit it without being hit yourself, and when you do get hit, you tend to get hit two or three times and often knocked into a hazard.

In addition, the Big Damn Twist is, well, it’s the same Big Damn Twist, which kind of illustrates the problem any video game adaptation has – you can’t really go changing things too much, so your biggest audience – fans of a show or movie – are Not Surprised when you have the exact same ending.

I think the real problem is, I’d had the game sitting in my “Play this, damnit!” stack since 1998, and there was no bloody way it was going to meet my expectations for it.  A little time spent setting my expectations properly before I began would probably have been a good idea.

After playing through a couple of rather dark PC games, I was going to give the Saturn action RPG “Magic Knight Rayearth” a try.  I own the thing twice over, after all – I bought the domestic version when it was released and then couldn’t resist buying the Japanese version when I found it for $4 in a used game store.

I decided that I’d give the Japanese version a try.  Not only would it give me much-needed language practice, but it would prevent me from having to grit my teeth through another Working Designs “translation”.

But, in the process of digging it out of the Saturn games box, I got distracted by a different title, a Lupin the 3rd game that has been patiently awaiting its time in a console for well over a decade: “Lupin the 3rd: The Sage of Pyramid.”

I bought this thing because it looked like, well, a Tomb Raider knockoff with everyone’s favorite thief in place of Lara, and that seemed like a pretty good concept for a game.

Looking at the disc, with Rayearth in the other hand, I decided that I’d give it a quick google and see if it was worth moving to the front of the stack – and I was rather startled to find an English-language review, from which I will quote the following excerpt:

“the entire game could easily be finished in an afternoon if the player so wishes”

That sounded promising.  It wouldn’t have been a selling point if I’d paid Y5800 for it back in 1998, but it seemed like a good amount of time to run around stealing things, while at the same time not wearing out its welcome.

I played through the first five levels in less than an hour, decided it was Right and Proper, put it aside to get some sleep, and finished it off in another 2 or 3 hour play session this morning/early afternoon.  It’s a very short game, and it’s quite shallow – you run through mazes looking for keys and occasionally fighting guards, you steal ancient treasures from tombs and have to run to an exit before being caught, there are maybe seven enemy types in the entire game, there’s no swimming and the platforming is pretty basic.

Nothing really much like Tomb Raider at all.

It does, however, have some nice anime sequences which serve to move the plot along, it begins and ends each level with some Fujiko eye-candy, and – shallow or not – it was still fun, with lots of music and sound effects from the show.  It looks horrible – even for a Saturn game, it doesn’t seem like the developers were trying very hard – and the control scheme just proved that, for all the lousy effects Sony had on the videogame industry in general, at least they gave us the analog twin stick… but I was apparently in the right frame of mind for mid-90s 3D, because it didn’t really bother me all that much.

I’ll get back to MKR next, honest.