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

[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.