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

[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).