Puzzle game weekend

[bluelander]

Kemco's Crazy Castle

I went on a bit of a puzzle game spree over the weekend, mostly action puzzle games. I was in the mood for a relaxing NES game I haven't played before, so I loaded up The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a game and franchise I was unaware of until Jeff Gerstmann ranked it in episode 9 (currently #104/374, a pretty decent showing. Well above the Spondylus Line.) It's a very basic movement game, sort of Lode Runner-esque but no digging. All you do is move around levels, going through doors, up and down stairs and through pipes trying to collect all the carrots in each level. There's a boxing glove you can pick up to defeat an enemy (usable once), objects scattered around some levels you can kick into enemies, and a potion that makes you invincible for about 5 seconds, and that's it as far as player mechanics. Most of the game is positioning, moving around trying not to be in the path of enemies, and figuring out how to exploit the enemy AI. The enemies do follow a script to try to get close to you but there's a bit of randomness baked in, so it can be tricky. If you pay close attention to the enemies, you learn how some of the enemies behave, so you'll be like "okay, the dark brown Sylvester goes up pipes but never down then, so I have to make sure I get the carrots at the top of the level quickly" or "Wile E. Coyote never goes through doors, so I have to save my boxing glove to deal with him." Little things, but it was enough to keep me entertained through all 60 levels. The later levels suffer from the same problem the NES port of Lode Runner has: the full level isn't on screen, so avoiding the enemies you can't see yet is often a matter of luck. But the game gives you an extra life after every level you complete and there's a password system, so it's forgiving enough to get through.

Lode Runner

I also tried the NES port of Lode Runner again. I wish they figured out a way to compensate for the offscreen enemy problem, because I really like how it looks and sounds. I made it through a dozen levels or so, but once you hit the levels with a lot of undiggable floors, it just gets too frustrating. I run right to get away from the enemies, clear out all the gold, head back left, whoops there's an enemy waiting on every viable path, I can't dig to get away from them, yay I'm dead. It's sad, but I gotta write this version off.

I tried to play proper Lode Runner, but I couldn't get the disk to work with the Apple II core (heh) in Bizhawk. I could've used a different emulator, but eh.

Kemco's normal castle

I tried the sequel to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a Gameboy game known as Mickey Mouse IV in Japan, The Real Ghostbusters in North America, and Garfield Labyrinth in Europe (this series has the weirdest mess of licenses I've ever seen.) It's a totally different type of game than TBBCS: you can jump, you have a life meter, you collect differently-shaped keys to open doors, and you have a digging button for solving Lode Runner-esque block puzzles. You don't trap enemies in holes, you just occasionally need to figure out how to dig down in a way that won't cause you to become trapped; but because you can just jump out of the hole if you're about to become trapped, it makes it feel more like chores than a fun puzzle to solve. The time it takes for the blocks to respawn is interminable, and you have a time limit for completing each level. I'm not into time limits, in any game really, but especially one where I'm solving puzzles. There's no worse feeling than figuring out what you need to do, but being unable to execute the plan and get to the exit quickly enough before time runs out. Solving a puzzle and then losing anyway makes me want to not play anymore. So I bailed on this one pretty quickly. Honestly, it's hard to even call this one a puzzle game, it's more of a bad platformer. It's on the original Gameboy, so it looks and controls like shit. I mean, it's not awful; if it were 1993, I was 8 years old and stuck on a long car ride, I would've been happy to have it, but I'm not going to play it when I have other options.

Moblin Sokoban

I played a little bit of Moblin Sokoban. That's not its name, but it's a recreation of the original sokoban from 1982, first released in Japan on the Fujitsu FM-7 computer, using the Moblin sprite and other graphics from The Legend of Zelda. I loaded it up because I wanted a game I could play with one hand while I eat, because I'm kind of bored of watching videos recently (note to self: books are a thing. Read a book, you ADHDingus)

It didn't really work, because neither eating nor using the arrow keys is something that's easy to do with my left hand, but I played a dozen or so levels after I finished eating anyway. It's a good version of the game, very basic but snappy movement, and it looks good, but I wish it didn't provide metrics for how many moves it takes to solve each level. I went on a little rant about this on fedi, which I'll place behind a cut to spare anyone who's already seen it

mini rant

I like sokoban, but I don't like ones that show how many moves and how much time you take to finish the puzzle. Even if it's not gating my progress based on score, the number is always really high and it makes me feel like I did a bad job. Just let me feel good about solving the puzzle please

Like, this moblin sokoban is good https://suppilulemur.neocities.org but what does it mean that it took me nearly a thousand moves to solve this puzzle? I dunno, I assume it means I sucked! I neither have nor want context for this data, so why provide it?

I was being a little harsh, I don't dislike Moblin Sokoban because it provides these metrics, I can make myself ignore them, I just would prefer they weren't there.

Anyway, it has 90 levels, which are overall much larger and trickier than modern sokoban games, so it'll give me a good bit of entertainment.

Chip's Challenge

Finally, I brought it all around full circle with the intersection of sokoban and action puzzle games: Chip's Challenge. This is a pretty legendary game most people know from its inclusion in various Microsoft Entertainment packs in the mid-90s, but it originally came out on the Atari Lynx in 1989. I never thought I'd play a Lynx game, but I checked to see if that version has retro achievements, and it does, so that's the version I'm playing. The achievements are reasonable: there's one for finishing all 8 tutorial levels on your first try, which I did in about 5 minutes after my first loop; There's an achievement for viewing an easter egg accessible from the main menu, a psychedelic mandelbrot fractal generator; the rest of the achievements are just for playing the game.

Which is good, but there are 150 levels and this game is fucking hard. I've played a little bit of the Windows version, but I apparently didn't get far past the tutorial, because I'm in the 20s and these levels are already kicking my ass. It has the dreaded time limit, and the number of times I've run out of time after solving the puzzle is >1, but unlike Garfbusters, the design of this game is interesting enough that I want to keep going. I may end up forgetting about the gold achievements and cheating to give myself infinite time, but if that's what it takes, I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. But if the levels get so hard that I'm not having fun even with infinite time, I'm not gonna push it.

I'm particularly interested in a set of mechanics in one level that bears a strong resemblance to the puzzle in Slime Resgoo Towlr and went on to play a part in the sequel, Quest For The Radiant Cake. There's a button you can step on that will cause a block to appear. When you push the block into water, it becomes a platform you can stand on. You repeat this process to build a bridge across the water, but where and how to build the bridge requires a little bit of lateral thinking. I'm pretty sure I never got that far in the game before, so I don't think I was consciously ripping it off, and it feels nice to have independently had the same idea.

Another level has a similar setup, except the blocks are scattered all over the place and the map is HUGE. At least huge relative to the 9 tile x 9 tile view of the world afforded by the Lynx's miserable 160x102 screen. I spent some time wandering around the map wondering where I should even start, when a light bulb went off. "You know," I thought, "I bet one of these blocks has the flippers underneath it." There are four power-ups that allow you to move freely on the four types of rough terrain: the shield for fire, skates for ice, the magnet for moving walkways and flippers for water. With the flippers, I could walk straight to the exit like the water wasn't there at all. I moved just about every rock on the map, and I was right. That felt good, like I got one over on the level, like I found the one weird trick puzzle designers don't want you to know about. That's what I want out of a puzzle game.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Mario's Picross on my phone when I have a spare minute. I made it to the star puzzles, which are a lot more difficult than the mushroom puzzles, so progress is slower but still satisfying. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Chip's Challenge when I have some time at home. I'll report back if I get frustrated and call it quits or if all the logic practice makes my brain spontaneously evolve into some kind of omniscient superintelligence with ESP. I figure it's 50/50.

Markdown update

Quick follow-up to something from the previous post: claudeb let me know that dreamwidth does, in fact, support markdown! There's no indication of this on the page where you write you entry, it looks more or less identical to the livejournal interface from 20 years ago, but if you bing "dreamwidth markdown", you'll find a 5 year old FAQ entry that explains that yes, dreamwidth does have full markdown support, you just have to start the entry with a special bangtag (!markdown). This whole entry has been written with markdown, so when I'm ready to copy it from my notes app into the post box and click "preview", I'll let you know how it works out:

Hey, it works perfectly! Thanks again claudeb

Comments

[claudeb]

There's also a big dropdown above the text box when you compose a post, and an option in your settings to change your default. Thanks for the shout-out!

[bluelander]

A drop-down that lets you select markdown? Nope, not on my end. All I get are tabs for swapping between HTML and "rich text" (which gives a sort of WYSIWYG editor.) Perhaps there's some new version of the editor UI I've not opted into