Stumbling through Solstice

[davidn]

Having been drifting further and further from my fifteen-minute target and producing the longest video in the world last time (or at least, the one that felt the longest), my aim for the continuation of this experiment was to return to a semblance of sanity. I wasn't sure whether I was going to get it, though, because the next thing on my list was something that rakarr gave me that I'd never heard of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9gI5hVh6-0

I don't really get anywhere much of note in the video - all you'll really see is me wandering around some dungeon somewhere, standing around stuck, and dying an awful lot, and my microphone was up too high so if you're on headphones, I'm sorry if you feel like I'm right behind you and breathing down your neck. But from what little I've experienced, the game itself seems really quite impressive in terms of scale. Like the very first game that inspired this experiment, it's one that I rather want to go back and play for real now, now that I understand what I'm doing and without knowing my utter failure at it is being watched (and so that I can use save states, probably).

Though I don't mention this in the video, I was struck by how Amiga-like the game felt, mostly from the music on the title screen and the style of bitmap fonts that it uses - I definitely wouldn't have guessed NES based on that information. Apparently the console was actually a lot more powerful than I'd given it credit for. I say during the video that this game could have been absolutely amazing a few years later on the SNES, but really, all that I felt was missing was just a shadow underneath the player so you could tell where on earth in the room you were. That and a small amount of direction as to what to actually do. But then, if NES games had that then I wouldn't be doing these videos.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Actually, Solstic was remade on the SNES, with improved graphics, an overworld, and the same style of confusing dungeon design: the game is basically impossible.

I'm not sure why I ever adored it, but I was at first so excited for the chance to play this game. The game somehow gives an air of a dangerous, mystical realm. It's certainly dangerous, alright!!

[davidn]

That sounds excellent - I've seen it now thanks to Ravenworks' link below, and both of them look like games that I'd be interested in playing through more. However, with the trouble I had with this one, I'd be very glad of a save state safety net for both...

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I know we must have discussed Tim Follin at some point - did you realise this was one of his soundtracks? :) The man's definitely a sound chip wizard, but I also wonder if part of how familiar the title music felt was just a matter of it coming from England... (if I'm recalling my PC history correctly in assuming that most Amiga games came from over there?)

Oh my goodness, I love those character portraits in the intro. :D That perfect mix of style and camp...

"Don't turn my noises into a ringtone or anything" NO COMMENT

You seem a bit more rushed or anxious this time!

"We've got a drum, a cake..." I guess you weren't watching during the intro where it showed you exactly what to do with those?

"Attempt 1 was 1.95% successful! Never say I don't look on the bright side." <3 X3

"I wonder if it freezes items as well..." You god damned genius!! I never would have thought of that!

"You have to be standing on top of things to pick them up. That's physically.... not advantageous." BRB writing crossover fanfiction between this and SMB2

"We have conveyor belts!" AIE, it's rather cruel of them to have conveyor belts but no way of showing which way they're even rolling!

..... that is the best interlude I've ever seen. (Is there some kind of significance to the clubs, that's metaphorically representing what's keeping you away from post-2000 social networks? :P)
Some part of me totally wants to find out what the other icons in GameFAQs do, even though I understand perfectly well that they're just visual props for a gag.... my brain's insistence on believing that it's an entire game is worrisome. :P
.... wait a minute, are those two characters next to FA supposed to be a dick and a mouth XD

"We rely on an impossible feat of gravity..." Is the game actually MEANT to be played like this, or is that just a technique that fans have figured out? (I liked your "freeze things in midair" method better!)

Anyway, yeah, now I'm kind of intrigued by this! Seems like the sort of thing I'd want to play with an infinite-lives code on, just to reduce the frustration factor, but it is awfully neat to explore a big labyrinth with distinct puzzles like that, isn't it?

Anyway, the SNES sequel Crassadon mentioned is called Equinox, if you're curious. I'd heard of it, but only ever seen screenshots... it seems significantly different (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBswql-rS7I&feature=related) in its feel, less like exploring a maze and more like conquering traditional videogame levels, but I could see how it could still be charming... I think the most interesting point is the fact that they actually gave the main character a shadow, but completely eliminated its usefulness by having it DISAPPEAR as soon as he's in the air. It's like they heard that there were requests for him to have a shadow, but they had no concept of why anyone was asking. (If anything, they seem to be deliberately obfuscating the level layout (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBswql-rS7I&feature=related#t=5m13s) using the perspective.. or else that was meant to be obvious and it's just revealing how careful the designers of the original were to manage to avoid these kinds of scenarios..) Holy crap, though - nice boss music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBswql-rS7I&feature=related#t=9m07s)! Even if it is accompanying the fighting of a creature who's mostly offscreen. (And if the end-of-boss-fight message does sound an awful lot like something GLaDOS would be saying to you.)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Oh - I was going to explain in greater depth about the sequel, but you beat me to it! Oh, the nostalgia... I played Equinox a lot in my early video-game days, and that was what made me interested in Solstice - I never have played it, but I jumped at the chance to have David do so. I actually believe I've rambled at him about it at some point in the past, but I do a lot of rambling so I don't blame him for forgetting.

I have very much enjoyed the game in the past, despite its quite deliberate unfairness, but I have to say that I actually find the boss music somewhat discordant and borderline terrifying - I can see the quality in it objectively, though.

[davidn]

I'm... surprised that you hadn't played this! I thought the point was to get me to play games that you enjoyed and to see how badly I did at them compared to an experienced NES player's... capabilities ;)

The boss music is an odd disjointed mixture of styles...! I'm just listening to it now, and it goes through the piano introduction, the choir that makes it sound like a Heretic map, and then a rave somewhere in hell.

[davidn]

I'm honestly not sure whether the technique of jumping off a box, picking it up, putting it down and then jumping off it again is an intended part of playing through the game, but I'm not really sure how some of the rooms are possible to pass without it. In the yellow room with the tall pillar leading to its exit, I was very proud of my own solution of freezing the items as they dropped, but I'm not sure whether that was the intended way to pass the room either!

I did know that the name Tim Follin was familiar, and that it was unusual seeing English names on a NES credits screen. I would have said that most Amiga games were made in Britain as well, but I hadn't realized that there was any specific quality to the music that made it particularly British. Is it the fast arpeggio sound that does it?

Yes, unfortunately I wasn't really watching the demo either time it played, though I realized how obvious it was when I played the video back to myself - it's strangely so much more difficult to... see what's in front of you when you're concentrating on talking (and I may have been more distracted by reading my prepared script at the start!)

In the ZZT environment of the interlude, the club symbols are an enemy called Ruffians :) (I realize as I'm typing this that they should be magenta instead of blue, but this is a simple mistake that any colourblind fool could have made.) I hate to spoil any mysteries, but all the scrolls I don't touch are just completely blank - though having said that, I don't know offhand what ZZT does when you pick up a blank scroll. And the characters near FA are a ZZT lion and bear, thank you very much...!

I really do love the exploration aspect of exploring a flick-screen labyrinth with very distinct rooms, just being able to set out and find something new (even if I hit walls quite early on here because of not knowing what I was doing). The sequel's more zoomed-in view does sort of make the rooms less... unique-feeling, just as you can't see them all at once. And that one in your link looks like it was designed by Escher. There's no way you could work out where to jump there without trial and error (even if a shadow were present, I would have gone ninety degrees in the wrong direction in more than a few places).

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"I hadn't realized that there was any specific quality to the music that made it particularly British. Is it the fast arpeggio sound that does it?"

I was thinking in a more general sense just of it being more... "western", and yet still well-made.... it seems like in America, we went straight from "PC Speaker" boops to the Soundblaster... which, don't get me wrong, had some fine pieces (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV7xokYRps8) written for it, but... by being so strictly based around the concept of only being able to provide a mediocre approximation of a very traditional set of instruments, there was very little room for anyone to excel at it.... on the kinds of chips that were popular in europe (or even just with the SID chip in the popular consciousness to set the bar for everyone else!), the "fidelity" was obviously distinctly lower, but the flexibility of it let people 'produce' their soundtracks to have exactly the sound they're looking for, rather than having every game sound like it's being played by the same minimum-wage in-house elevator music band that just sits in your computer until someone throws them a new set of sheet music.... plus, in that wonderfully ironic way, I think the reduced fidelity itself might have let people's imaginations fill in more details that the FM synth cards were perfectly able to show you were absolutely not there. ;)

Err, that got really rambly.... my point is just, all the good chip music came from japan and england (or europe in general), and while the japanese stuff has (via the consoles) wound up coming to be thought of as what "videogame music" sounds like (at least to me), the european stuff actually sounds like what popular music of the time sounded like, y'know?

I think I got off track again... I'm too eager to talk about this stuff, and too tired for my brain to step in and filter it down to just what the question was ;) I think I made my point though?

"In the ZZT environment of the interlude, the club symbols are an enemy called Ruffians :)"

:O I think I'm insulted. X3

"And the characters near FA are a ZZT lion and bear, thank you very much...!"

Now I can't figure out if I just have a vividly dirty imagination, or if your usual associations with those characters are so strong that you actually didn't see the little rebus they wound up making <_<

[davidn]

I wouldn't ever let you away without at least partial blame for a dirty imagination - however, it's true that thanks to ZZT, I've learned very strong associations with some of those symbols that I forget don't really exist for most people. The omega symbol just is a lion, pi is a tiger, the degree symbol is a bullet and has to be avoided...

I think I understand your explanation of the music, though I really hadn't noticed the difference between the cultures of the music before. The Soundblaster really did produce... unearthly sounds (though not on the same level as the Megadrive, because frankly nothing is), even though it sounded so impressive at the time having come up from a PC speaker...

Your thoughts sound sort of similar to why I think I liked the 8 and 16-bit style of music so much - that in the absence of realistic instrument sounds, composers really had to make their music stand out and be memorable melodically. However, as you have diagnosed that I now like very 'deliberate' music... I wonder if it's actually the other way around, and that they just didn't have much to work with in the way of subtlety and so the emphasis on strong melodies came about because of that.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Sorry... I'm not sure I understand the difference between the two possibilities in your last paragraph..?

(And, actually, I meant that they had to make more interesting instrument sounds, but your point about the composition is very true too!)

[davidn]

And I also meant to say - I noticed that I seemed a lot more frantic than the situation required, especially near the beginning when working out my controls. As I don't remember doing this while my trousers were on fire, I think that it was just a combination of me being out of breath thanks to zapping through the introduction, and having the microphone turned up too high so you could hear my nonagenarian gasps.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I only watched the first few minutes so far but completely forgot you were colourblind until you were describing the potions.

[davidn]

It's something that doesn't really come up an awful lot in conversation... I would even hesitate to call it a disability, even though it's a definite defect compared to normal eyes - I just can't imagine a world in which red and green are distinct non-confusable colours. It's easy to forget that anyone has it, until something like this comes up.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

What do you see when you look at a spectrum? I was just thinking there that we would see it transisting gradually or would you see it go back to the first colour in the middle part?

Also yellows, if that is a mix of the red and green, do you just see it as a lighter shade rather than as another distinct colour.

It is something that you don't think of much.

[davidn]

What do you see when you look at a spectrum?

A poor alternative to the Commodore 64.

No, I know what you mean but I'm having great difficulty describing it to someone who sees them so differently. On most spectrums I can tell the difference between the peaks of red and green because those are so different from each other (I can see the difference between #FF0000 and #00FF00, and while I'm on the subject can see colours generally better in hex) but... on this one, for example, yes - around the brightest stripe of yellow, it appears to me to graduate into the same colour on both sides before splitting off into more distinct ones. Yellow to me looks significantly brighter than either the red or the green.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to compare how many bars people see on these charts. Apparently there are people who see more colours than other people, typically females more than males.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you decided to try this, and that you enjoyed it. Used correctly, the NES can be capable of some fairly impressive things, and it seems to have been very well-tailored to the system. As mentioned, I haven't played this one myself, but it always interested me because of my history with the sequel, which I also hope you'll try at some point.

I thought you did very impressively, also - it would have taken me much longer to work out the effects of the potions and how to progress past the first few rooms, but you handled it deftly and made good progress - despite apparently completely ignoring the demo movie. As always, your vocalisations, descriptions and comments are clever, and the ZZT interlude was simply a work of genius.

This does seem a rather different game from Equinox. You have less offensive capability and so it seems a tad more focused on exploring and platforming, and your quest is to collect all those staff pieces rather than, well, defeat various bosses as in Equinox. The latter is also tied together by an overworld map screen and the more zoomed-in nature of it, while atmospheric, does make the perspective impossible to determine sometimes...

For confusing isometric views you might also try Landstalker on Mega Drive, a game I recall getting quite immersed in back in the day. Or its spiritual successor Alundra on the Playstation, which manages to be confusing despite having a Zelda-style top-down view.

[davidn]

I really was stumbling through and just relying on luck - it's sort of embarrassing to see how pleased I was with the solution to the yellow room with the high pillar, when the obvious route to escape was demonstrated right in the introduction...! I'm not sure how else you're supposed to get through on the top level if not by using the weird gravity trick, though. I'd definitely love to try going through it seriously - I wonder if it actually has bosses or... anything, outside the few rooms that I discovered during my exploration (I imagine the cave is a common area that you're dropped down to if you fall off the higher levels at most any point during the game).