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Adventure: when the bat carries the dragon

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I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have a category for Atari 2600 games until now, but on reflection that’s because there’s not a huge amount to say about most of them. Playing through the games included on the Atari 50 compilation, most titles require little strategy or thought, instead relying on pure reflexes and quick action. The most successful games are the arcade conversions in the main, although their quality is somewhat varied – and the fact that on the compilation you have access to both the arcade original as well as the 2600 port means that the home conversion is generally a curio only.

There are, of course, exceptions. Haunted House and Adventure were much more in-depth than other games on the platform, despite their short length. I must have played through Adventure a hundred times over the past forty years, mostly in game variant 3.

  • Variant 1 is an easy introduction with a single maze and only two dragons.
  • Variant 2 expands the map with more castles, mazes, dragons and items, and also introduces the bat
  • Variant 3 is the same as variant 2, but all the items are placed in random places

The bat is possibly the most annoying part of the game. In variant 2 it starts by flying down the screen and stealing your sword, meaning you are defenceless against the roaming dragons – unless you manage to catch the bat itself in the screen to the South. My favourite strategy to minimise danger and reduce the randomness is to catch the bat, and carry it to kill the first dragon in the maze to the West of the starting position, and then hopefully the bat will then drop the sword and carry the dead dragon off and deposit it somewhere else.

The black castle always feels ominous.

It doesn’t always work like that, though. There have been occasions where the sword doesn’t kill the dragon but instead the bat grabs the live dragon and carries it off. After this you never know when you’re going to be surprised when you enter a new room. Even worse is when the bat grabs the live dragon, which then swallows you, and you are carried from screen to screen until the bat decides to deposit you somewhere.

Or, as shown in the header image of this post, the bat drops a dead dragon and steals the bridge, trapping you in a small area in the maze with no escape.

Variant 3 deals with this randomness by institutionalising it. Every item – keys, swords, dragons – is randomised at the start, and this means that you need quick reactions and a certain amount of patience to find what’s needed while avoiding the dragons. And the bat’s back as well. I will win every time when playing variants 1 and 2, but variant 3 has no guarantee of the sword being available before the dragons, and there are only a certain number of rooms you can run away to.

The game holds up remarkably well. It’s short, no doubt, but because of this it’s really replayable and fun. So many games have developed from this, but it’s still worth going back to the roots. Needless to say, I completed this, several times.

Populous the Beginning: fog of war

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I hate fog of war. I particularly hate it when the enemy uses it to land loads of boats in quick succession and then set off a volcano in the middle of my base.

The joke was on them in the end, though. The top of the volcano provided a great platform for several watch towers manned by fire warriors, who then knocked people out of any subsequent boats before they could land. It took a while to build up my tribe again, of course, but once I had enough warriors and preachers I created a causeway and set up a camp on the top of a hill overlooking the yellow’s base, from where I could rain down lightning and swarms. Capturing boats would have just been a bit too slow.

I haven’t mentioned the unseen enemy level here. It turned out to be pretty easy, for once, as the enemy only attacked across one thin land bridge, making it easy to defend. I kept a fair number of warriors and preachers in the centre of my base to deal with the invisibility issues, but there were few occasions they were needed.

Populous the Beginning: building a bridge, again

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A new computer, and starting from the beginning of Populous the Beginning, again. This time I could have imported my previous save, and I still might, but with the increased graphical prowess of the new laptop I thought the game deserved a full showing. This coincided with an update to the game on GOG, which has made it run much more consistently and stable on Windows 11, and I’ve been running it through GOG Galaxy rather than the multiverse launcher which had previously been needed. To be honest, the quality improvements through the multiverse mean I’ll probably revert to that at some point, but for now I’ll up my time played counter on GOG.

PC gaming is still mostly about configuration.

None of the first levels gave me a problem, of course, although I had forgotten the best strategy for Death from Above and spent a minute or so bumbling around the world in a boat. I still passed it first time, though, after gathering multiple warriors and preachers and surrounding my shaman on her trip to the statue.

I finished with quite an epic battle on Building Bridges. The green tribe opened up the passage to my peninsular quite early, so I was having to fight them off at the same time as fending off yellow raids. It was only after I reinforced the three entry points with multiple followers, and set my shaman on top of a hillside to concentrate on lightning spells, that I was able to amass enough force to take the totem and open the bridge between the two tribes, sparking a conflict between them.

The next level to play is one of my least favourite – Unseen Enemy. I’ll tackle that when I’ve got some time and patience.

Flock: a different type of bird watching

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In many ways, Flock reminds me of Flower, the relaxing1 and peaceful game on the PS3 (and other Sony consoles) where you gently guide the wind and petals to find new blooms. Guiding your character – someone riding a giant bird – is really easy, with the vertical component automatically taken care of and only the horizontal direction left for your input. This means you can spend time looking in the distance for where you want to go, and also for signs of creatures.

You have to find the creatures, you see. Your aunt is a zoological expert but she can’t be bothered to move from her water tower perch, so instead you have to go out into the world and search for them. When you find a creature, you can observe it for a little while before having to identify it. Is it a bewl (bean-like creatures with no legs), a gleeb (generally those with wings), or a drupe (a bit of a catch-all category)? Once you’ve identified the family, you get more accurate descriptions to compare against the creature on the screen. Why we need to identify the creatures is unclear, since Aunt Jane tells us if we get them right or wrong. Really she should just get down and do it herself.

That would be a bit more of a boring game, though.

Creature hunting isn’t the only aspect though. Evil robber creatures have stolen flutes and knitting patterns and are buried in mounds of grass. You have to find these mounds, and get the flying sheep that follow you around to graze there. Once they’ve eaten all the grass you can see the tail of the awful evil baddie, and you can pull them out of the hole. This is needed if you want to get the whistles for each family of creatures, and once you have the whistle you can get any creature to join your flock, following you around. You can also increase the number of sheep by finding them around, and increase the number of creatures in your flock, and (most importantly) get new clothes to wear.

It’s really difficult to get a decent picture of how the flock follows you around.

To start with there’s not much of the world uncovered, and you can see creatures relatively easily. After a while the Emperor Cosmet appears, and when it’s been identified the fog or clouds or mist or … whatever it is clears a bit, and new areas are revealed. Some of the creatures require more of a stealthy approach. Some are really fast and you have to be lucky to see them. Some are just rare. As well as the requirement to find the creatures, some of your Aunt’s friends are dotted around the levels on perches, and you have to find them and carry out other tasks.

The game has an amazing and consistent art style, and charm by the bucketful. The day/night cycle is quite affecting, and I suspect that the reason that some of the spaces in my catalogue are still unfilled is because I need to look at certain times of the day. I think I’ve unlocked most of the map now, but there are still entire families which are undiscovered.

  1. Until the horrendous and depressing last level. ↩︎

Pokémon Blue: settling to a team

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I have a feeling I am now at the point where I lost interest in Pokémon Yellow, and I recall feeling a little uncertain when I reached this point in Pokémon LeafGreen. When I last wrote, Pikachu was several levels higher than my other pokémon due to him fighting and defeating every enemy in the caves; I now have a similar problem with Dugtrio whose Dig (and now Earthquake) moves proved invaluable when scaling Pokémon Tower, and fighting the electrical enemies. I have progressed through the underground passages, obtained a silph scope (which allowed me to identify the ghosts in Lavender Town), fought Giovanni – the boss of Team Rocket, routed the inept baddies from Silph Co, woken Snorlax1 with a poké flute and then captured him, and found a mansion containing the programmers of the game.

My team is all around the high 30s, other than Dugtrio who is at 47, and I am having to resist the urge to just use him over and over again. I am fairly settled with a team of Dugtrio, Charizard, Weepingbell, Vaporeon, Haunter and Pikachu – waiting for a couple of them to evolve – but I’m aware that others may come along to replace them at some point.

I am varying the colour scheme I play with to suit my location, the time of day, and the strain on my eyes.

Indeed, I’m not sure where I’m off to now. I have just obtained the SURF and FLY moves, but currently there’s no pokémon in my party who can learn FLY so I’m taking the opportunity to journey by foot and level up my companions some more. There are large areas to the south with oceans which were previously unreachable, so I’m heading home to see my mother and then onwards to the southern islands.

  1. My previous style guide continues. Since I don’t rename my pokémon, one that I have caught and am holding is capitalised as a proper noun. The generic name for that type of pokémon is not capitalised. I caught Snorlax when I woke him up, but then when I woke the second snorlax I was unable to catch it despite the fact I threw multiple balls at him when he was at virtually zero health and also asleep. ↩︎