Together Retro: Eighties' Ladies' Night

[pierrot]

Oof, I was kind of hoping Sol Bianca would meet the eighties part of the criteria, but it seems it was released in June of 1990. I think that's still basically the eighties--. <_<

It's a little unfortunate that most of the games I'd really like to play for this were released in the 90s. Oh well. I started on Dragon Slayer IV, and put a number of hours into killing cat-people with the dog, "Poochy." I tried wandering around a little bit with a couple of the other characters, but scouting out what I can with Poochy is just so much safer, since it's invincible to normal enemies. My hours of grinding netted me a couple suits of armor, four boxing gloves, five fire wands, 80 spare gold, and 109 keys (which appears to be the max). I'm a little afraid of turning off the console, because I feel like the password probably won't retain my gold and keys.

This is another game that I kind of wish I had the manual for. I had to look up what the items and such do, partly because I was freaking out, after spending a bunch of time grinding with Poochy, thinking that I had doomed him to a life among cat-people, with no way to return home for a password. Fortunately I found that the crystal ball can be used to warp back to the house, otherwise I would have been angry. I mostly enjoy it, so far. I'm not really sure how to get to the bosses, but I'm happy that this one involves collecting crowns to acquire the Dragon Slayer, again, like how it was in the original (even if the two games play almost nothing like each other). I'm hoping I don't have to start resorting to a guide to figure things out, but at some point I might just lose patience.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I finally found Princess Moonbrook in Dragon Quest 2! I had to look up how though, because I correctly found her in the world, but wasn't doing /quite/ the right thing to get her to actually join me. A little tough keeping her alive with how far behind she is in levels combined with how she can't wear most armor, but nothing impossible so far

[noiseredux]

Got myself a hovercraft for the waterways in Phantasy Star II. Life is good.

[nullPointer]

I beat The Colonel's Bequest over the weekend and recorded some thoughts over in the Games beaten thread. In a nutshell I found it to be a fairly middling entry in the overall Sierra catalog, though I suspect that if the setting had fully resonated with me I would have been blown away.

Here's something I meant to mention in the other thread. BONUS ANALYSIS!

The beginning of the game is introduced as if you're watching a stage play. All the characters are introduced as an ensemble cast on a stage setting with curtains drawn. Each time you start the game it will ask you, "Have you previously attended a performance of The Colonel's Bequest?" as a means of determining whether to play the intro or launch you directly into the game. This stage play motif is never mentioned in the game again. No, in fact the rest of the game plays it completely poe faced as if these events are happening to Laura Bow who's living her life and continues to live her life after the conclusion of the game. This all felt very incongruous to me. If the intent was to have it all be a play, there should have been concessions made to that end. Perhaps at the conclusion of the game the cast should have taken a bow or something. If the intent was to have it transpiring in real life, then they should of scrapped the oddly out of place introduction. But instead you have this odd, "is it or isn't it?" affair. Perhaps it's just me being overly literal and they were going for, "as the observer, you get to decide whether what you saw was real," but it just didn't feel that way. If they were trying for some clever observer based meta-interpretation they didn't go far enough in that direction either. To be fair ... each in-game hour is denoted as Act I, Act II, etc., but yeah once again it just didn't feel like they were going all in on this stage play idea. Now I'm super curious to know whether the sequel to this game The Dagger of Amon Ra uses this theater motif or whether Sierra (wisely IMO) scrapped it altogether.

As Ex pointed out in the Games Beaten thread though, the graphics in The Colonel's Bequest are amazing. If you enjoy EGA graphics, this one is a real feast for the eyes.

[Exhuminator]

The Colonel's Bequest are amazing. If you enjoy EGA graphics, this one is a real feast for the eyes.

Sierra's VGA games also look great, but their background artwork was via scanned in paintings, massaged for low resolution. However Sierra's EGA games' graphics were completely made via manual pixel art. That's a LOT of work, every pixel was deliberately placed by hand. Labor of love IMO.

[Exhuminator]

The past few nights I've been trying to get good enough at The Wing of Madoola to beat it. I managed to get to stage 13 last night (there's 16 stages total). I'm glad the game offers infinite continues, but passwords would have been appreciated to save progress. Anyway, I like Madoola enough to beat it... maybe tonight I can pull it off. Other than Madoola there's a few arcade games I'm planning to go through for ELN. In that regard I decided to make my 10 ELN beats legit '80s games. The Metroid variant I will play (and hopefully finish) doesn't really count technically, so it'll just be a bonus number 11. I hope everybody else is having fun wearing neon skirts and kickin' ass.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Well...the translation patch on my copy of Bug Honey causes the game to glitch and will not let me proceed past the second level. Accordingly, I will be starting over - without the translation patch - tonight. Oh well...at least I’ll get to play as the Hudson Honey Bee Girl again...

[pierrot]

The past few nights I've been trying to get good enough at The Wing of Madoola to beat it. I managed to get to stage 13 last night (there's 16 stages total). I'm glad the game offers infinite continues, but passwords would have been appreciated to save progress. Anyway, I like Madoola enough to beat it...

Nice! You were pretty much right there. I found Stage 12 to be the most difficult part of the game, and it took up the bulk of my time invested. After that I pretty much breezed through to the final stage.

Just a hint for the final stage, if you want it:

Down + Jump.

Passwords would have been nice, but I was just thankful to find that continues existed. Every time I had played it in the past, I thought I would have to go through everything from the beginning, after dying. That kind of difficulty usually takes the wind out of my sails pretty quickly.

--

I made a fair amount of progress in Dragon Slayer IV (aka Legacy of the Wizard) last night. I, thankfully, finished up that bum Xemn's portion of the dungeon, which was basically hell. I made the unfortunate realization, after beating the first midboss with Poochy, that all the grinding I did for multiple pieces of armor, boxing gloves, etc, was all completely unnecessary, because the equipment all goes back into greater pool of items after getting a crown and beating a midboss. Unfortunate, but I have two crowns now, and I was working on getting a third with Lilulu. After scouring her area, and getting to the crown, the midboss messed me up, hard. I tried going back again, picking up all the worthwhile treasure along the way. I thought I would warp out with a crystal ball, and just save (which I really wish I had stuck to), but decided to just give it another shot, because I was in such great shape. Even at full health that thing can kill me in three hits. I was pretty upset, especially because it was pretty late by that point. I took a look at a route map for Lilulu, and found that I could actually get a shield with her, in a different area of the dungeon. So, that's what I'll do.

I enjoy that I haven't had to particularly rely on a guide for this one. In that sense, it's quite a bit like the original Dragon Slayer: brutal, and unforgiving, but still reasonable. It's also totally unlike Romancia, which is a hodgepodge of the most unreasonable trials I've probably ever seen in a video game. I'm also enjoying the soundtrack quite a bit.

[alienjesus]

I’m glad you’re enjoying trucking through still. Personally I was happy to look up some help myself. If you need any tips and don’t want to look stuff up yourself, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to remember what I did!

[pierrot]

I’m glad you’re enjoying trucking through still. Personally I was happy to look up some help myself. If you need any tips and don’t want to look stuff up yourself, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to remember what I did!

Cool, thanks! I feel like I'm basically ready to beat the game, just having the descriptions of the items, though. Once I get Lilulu's crown, anyway. I am kind of annoyed by being forced into carrying certain items all the time, with certain characters. There are a lot of options I would like to put into Lilulu's inventory for the boss fight, but the game wants to force me to hold onto the pickaxe and high-jump shoes just to get over the wall between the inn and the crown chest. I managed to find a way to get rid of the high jump shoes, by jumping off the lion statue, when it becomes animated, but now that I'll have to have the shield on me, I'll have to leave behind either the boxing gloves, or a revival potion. Maybe it doesn't really matter, since I don't imagine there will be any real time for me to switch off of the shield during the fight, anyway.