Hoskat

Genre: Adventure Publisher: Broderbund Total time played: 6 hours Short review: A clone of Zelda II that is harder than Castlevania III and more cryptic than Castlevania II featuring characters from Greek Mythology. Interesting links related to The Battle of Olympus Speedrun (31min 09sec) Soundtrack Video Review (HalfBlindGamer) Written Walkthrough My first memory of this game was during the brief period of my childhood when I was obsessed with Greek and Roman Mythology. I would rent this game and the movie Clash of the Titans on a regular basis. I always enjoyed the game but never beat it. Playing it as an adult I see why, it is probably the hardest game on the NES that I have played for the blog up to this point. Let’s get this out of the way right up front, I had to use save states to beat this game. In the game your currency is olives which enemies drop when they are killed. In most games to pick up an item you walk over it, in Battle of Olympus you have to kneel down in front of the item, a realistic touch. When you die you lose half of the olives you have collected. At the beginning of the game this isn’t that big of a deal but when you have to get through a maze of enemies while trying to not fall into holes to get to a remote location with 70 olives to buy a sword or 80 Olives to buy the Power Bracelet it becomes an issue. At first, I tried to play the game legit only using the save states to not have to write down the extremely long passwords. Honestly, the passwords in this game, and Metroid, are so long that it would take 5 or more minutes to input them just to start the game. The save states allow me to just turn on the system and start playing which means that 5 minutes that used to be for inputing a password is now for getting farther in the game. The Retron 5 save states saved me from having to enter a long password like this each time I turned on the game. I ended up dying over and over trying to get the final sword in the game. Each time having to spend 20+ minutes getting back the olives I lost when I died. After several tries I gave up and just decided to create a save state at the beginning of the part of the world where the sword was and when I died I would reload that saved game so I didn’t have to spend all the time collecting olives again. Technically this is cheating, but I never used the save states to advance slowly through hard sections, I used it solely to save time from collecting the olives over and over again. The story is very typical of an NES game but features a lot of the mythological Gods and creatures that I loved as a kid which made it a little more special (even if all the Gods look just alike). The game has a few major flaws. First off, it is impossible to know where to go or what to do. You can walk into each cave or building and talk to the townspeople who will give you hints on where to go next but I didn’t find the hints obvious enough to help. I had to rely some on video and written walkthroughs. World map – looks simple enough, right? The game starts you off inside a house in Arcadia. When you leave you can walk to the left or right. If you walk one direction you end up going to Argolis, the other direction takes you to Attica or Peloponnese? I honestly can’t remember, it made no sense. I would have been ok if you walk right or left and ended up walking to another part of the map but that isn’t how the game works. The small hut in the picture below takes you to a different spot on the map. It is almost as if that entire part of the map is inside this small house. The map made even less sense to me than the map in Friday the 13th (which at the time of this review I still can’t beat). Luckily you eventually get a harp that allows you to call pegasus to pick you up and take you to a pre-determined location on the map (but, there is no rhyme or reason as to why calling Pegasus in Pythia takes you to Laconia.) Unfortunately you can only use the Pegasus when you are standing in front of a specific small statue. Walking into this house takes you to a different spot on the map Riding the Pegasus to somewhere. Or what about this one. Do you see the black rectangle in the middle of the black area behind this woman that is inside a tree? This takes you to another spot on the map as well, things like this are so easy to miss. How did I miss the door behind the old woman? Because it is nearly invisible. Once you get a handle on how to navigate the world (you won’t ever feel comfortable) you have to stay alive. At the beginning it isn’t too bad but as you progress and get stronger weapons and items the enemies get harder. There are bats throughout the game that I never once felt comfortable attacking. Their patterns seemed random and they were perfectly positioned to knock me into a hole on a regular basis. I found them to be more annoying that the Medusa’s in the Castlevania games. Speaking of Castlevania, there are also little jumping monkeys similar to those in Castlevania that I never felt comfortable fighting. Castlevania monkey on the left, Battle of Olympus monkey on the right. I appreciated that the game had secrets but I didn’t like that the things needed to advance even a little bit into the story were hard to figure out. The walking between different sections of the map never felt comfortable and as the game progressed there were more mazes. Mazes in the forest, mazes in the mountains and mazes inside castles. The final stage of the game is a maze of death. I gave up and had to look at the map online because I was tired of wandering in circles getting killed by bats and monkeys and gargoyles and snakes and medusas and never getting anywhere. The menu featuring the 4 weapons you use throughout the game on the first row. The second row is the harp that calls Pegasus, the Ocarina which calls a dolphin, the flask which refills your life bar and the two crystals which make hidden doors and the final boss visible. Third row is the shoes that allow you to jump higher and walk on ceilings, the shield, the number of salamanders you have (another form of currency that I never even had 1 of), the power bracelet which makes your attacks stronger and a key that opens a door. When I started playing the game I thought “this game is very fun, the controls are tight, the graphics are bright, the music is good and each part of the world looks different so it is never boring.” At first it is every bit as enjoyable as Zelda II and even non-gamers could pick up the controller and have some fun. But, if you goal is to beat the game it isn’t going to happen without some help (save states, video walkthrough, written walkthroughs or 100 hours of practice). If I wasn’t dying I was getting lost. This could have been a perfect game if the difficulty had been ramped down by 50% and there was an easy way to navigate between worlds and the townspeople actually gave you better clues to find hidden doors and items that only appear if you are standing in a certain location and blow on your ocarina. I’m glad I’ve finally beaten Battle of Olympus but I’m sad I couldn’t do it without the use of save states. The controls, graphics and sound are all an 8 heart game, the difficulty, mazes and cryptic gameplay are horrible meaning I couldn’t justify giving the game more than 4 hearts. View the full article

Genre: RPG Publisher: Nintendo Total time played: 14 hours Short review: The first accessible RPG on the NES. Not as good as Final Fantasy due to an unnecessarily menu system but still a classic. Interesting links related to Dragon Warrior Speedrun (tool assisted in 17min 47sec) How to beat Dragon Warrior in 5 minutes Soundtrack Video Review (CGRUndertow) Dragon Warrior dungeon maps I first heard of this game through Nintendo Power and it wasn’t something that really struck my 7 year old fancy. However, my mom and a friend of hers bought it on release day, plowed through it in a week and then sold it to a local video store before I had a chance to play it. I ended up buying all 4 Dragon Warrior games for $2 each at a yard sale a couple of years later and played through the first game in high school. Dragon Warrior is the first RPG I played and I loved it. But, that is because it was the first RPG I had played. The game is very basic compared to other games in the genre. The story is very typical “save the princess.” The game features a large overworld similar to Zelda where you walk long distances to reach towns to buy better weapons and longer distances to find dungeons where you pillage treasure and fight monsters. That is pretty much the entire game. It is a loooong game by NES standards. While walking around the overworld you are randomly thrown into battles with enemies ranging from a small slime to a giant dragon. As you start the game you are very weak, have no money, no weapons, no armor and no experience. The only way to get these things is to fight monsters. As you kill enemies you earn experience points and gold. Experience points help your character level up which increases your hit points, magic points, attack power, speed and every once in a blue moon you learn a new spell. The gold is used to buy stronger weapons, tougher armor and healing herbs. The enemy that drops the most gold is the “Goldman” who I did not encounter often enough. He would drop up to 199 gold with each fight, other enemies drop between 1-99 gold mid-way through the game. Some of the items cost over 10,000 gold so, I spent a lot of time trying to build up gold. Here is the Goldman – I forgot to snag a photo of him on my play though. So I would like to thank “Davy” and Google for helping me out. If you were to break down the game it would be 90% fighting the same enemies over and over trying to level up, 10% actual progressing the story. Not to mention, without a map of the overworld and all of the caves you are going to spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly looking for something to do. As the game progressed I went from being mad at how many fights I got into and how much time I spent grinding gold and experience but at some point I quit getting mad and found the fighting to be almost therapeutic. The music fits perfectly and every time I would get a level up or acquire a new item that makes fighting a little easier I got a little rush. But, once I had the best sword and armor and no longer needed gold for anything I started to grow tired of fighting enemies again but I had to keep doing it as I wasn’t strong enough to fight the Dragonlord. I spent many hours walking back and forth in this area collecting gold and experience. The enemies kind of guide you on your journey. If you find a new enemy and it kills you really quickly you probably aren’t ready to go that way just yet. At the beginning of the game you are given the option to choose the speed at which the text appears on the screen throughout the game. If you do not choose “fast” you are going to regret it. Each battle is filled with text of the attacks you and your enemy do and after a very small number of battles you will be pulling your hair out wishing they would go by faster. Later RPG’s keep the same formula but the battles are now more action based and don’t require as much reading. My biggest gripe about the game, other than the amount of time I spent trying to build experience, is that you have to open the menu and select “stairs” to walk up or down stairs, select “door” to open a door, select “talk” to talk to someone. In the other great NES RPG Final Fantasy all of this is done by hitting the A button, you don’t have to open a menu. The menu and the level grinding make Dragon Warrior drag on longer than it needs to. I understand that back in the early days of gaming programmers wanted people to get their money’s worth out of a game so they did anything they could to make it longer but in 2016 I would rather play a shorter game that isn’t so tedious. Looks like pre-Mortal Kombat Noob Sabot moonlighted as a Demon Knight in Dragon Warrior I ended up beating the game on level 19 which required 22,000 experience points. To put that in perspective, I don’t know that I found any enemy who gave me more than 54 experience points per battle and a lot of the enemies give 2-10 experience points per battle. Well, that is unless you count the metal slime which gives 115 experience but I only was able to defeat 2 of them while playing. My routine was as follows: walk to a spot where the strongest enemies I could beat were Fight enemies until my hit points were low Use the heal spell to replace hitpoints fight enemies until him hit points were low and I had no more magic power to perform heal spell Use herbs to heal myself until I ran out of herbs walk back to a village and stay at the Inn to replace my hit points and magic power. repeat Eventually, when I got the strongest armor in the game I no longer needed to do all of that as each step I took replaced one hit point. This means I didn’t need to use as many heal spells or herbs which meant I didn’t have to walk back to town to stay at the Inn as often. But, even with that I still had to spend 3-4 hours fighting random battles from the time I was able to fight the final boss until I was strong enough to defeat him. The game is still a classic and if you are looking to play an RPG for the first time and have 12-15 hours to kill this one will teach you the basics without confusing you with difficult spells and complex side quests. View the full article