The Closeout Warrior

Like a lot of games that I played over the years, I had no idea what was going on in Hero of the Golden Talisman, and the title screen didn’t actually help me understand it at all.

What I do know is that you’re a guy and you have to run around a labyrinth collecting flags and trying to find and defeat dragons. The flags somehow increase your firepower, which is kind of important because the dragons are kind of strong, and you have to kill off the dragons to get back the pieces of the titular Golden Talisman to… uh… I don’t really know to what end. I guess to win the game.

I played this game a fair number of times, but didn’t really make much of what you might call progress. This is due to two main things. Firstly, the map to this game is huge! A lot huger than I actually knew, and the impotent mini-map that’s provided to you is absolutely worthless. And somehow it never dawned on me to actually make a pencil-and-paper map to find my way around the place, which would have been a really smart idea.

Now, you might notice by looking at that map that there are lots of vertical shafts that have ledges that you need to jump on. Thing is, though, that you can’t directly control yourself after you jump off a ledge, but you instead bounce off the walls, which brings me to my second thing. I had a real hard time lining up my jumps correctly. I’d invariably mis-time it, and miss the ledge I was aiming for by a few microns, then plummet far out of my way. Then I’d take the several minutes to make it back to the original ledge to jump it off again, only to mis-judge it the other way and still miss the jump.

Then, after missing the same jump a few dozen times, I just kind of got bored with it and decided to put in something that I was a little better at.

My first exposure to the Great Giana Sisters was with some bootleg disk that came from who knows where. I remember reading the documentation that came with it which said that the game looked very Mario-ish, so he changed some of the graphics around to make them looks more like the familiar Mario Universe. It wouldn’t be until years later that I would pick up the original version of this game and realize just how much of a Mario clone it is.

Story? What story? Typical of many games from that time, you were lucky if you got a paragraph or two telling you what was going on. You run to the right, collecting diamonds and powerups, stomping on or shooting fireballs at enemies, and have to reach the structure at the end of the level to proceed. And if you find a hidden room or two? Good for you!

The game itself is relatively solid, though I had to wuss out and turn on infinite lives to finish it (I was 10 and impatient). But the thing to take note of here is the music. It sounds pretty lethargic in the video above, and I can’t find a proper Commodore 64 emulator that will play the song at the tempo I remember it. So either my memory’s faulty or the emulators are. But the music for this game is quite good, and almost certainly fueled my lifelong interest in chiptunes.

You could convincingly argue that there are no new ideas in video games. Snood is a ripoff of Puzzle Bobble, Zuma is a ripoff of Puzzloop, and Tetris… well, they just call Tetris ripoffs Tetris. Bubble Ghost, however, is not quite like any game that I’ve seen before or since.

The Bubble Ghost is a ghost that lives in a castle that is particularly inhospitable to bubbles, there are pointy things, fire, electricity, and fans(?) everywhere. Shockingly, the ghost has a bubble in its possession, and even more shockingly intends to take it through a series of rooms in the castle. You know, the ones with the pointy things. The ghost, as it happens, can’t touch the bubble or anything else, the only way he can interact with his environment is by blowing. He has to blow the bubble around the impressively dangerous castle. To what end? I can’t really say. I couldn’t get through more than a couple of rooms before I gave up on this game completely. Adorable games shouldn’t be this hard!

There have been many, many Lemonade Stand-esque games, but the first one that I played was on the Commodore 64. These days, however, I can’t find much info on it, so I’m probably mis-remembering some of the details, but here we go anyway.

What kid doesn’t want to own a lemonade stand over the summer? Aside from all the normal kids, that is. As much as I wanted to earn money by selling ridiculously overpriced glasses of lemonade, I didn’t because I didn’t want to sit in front of my house in the scorching heat while nobody ever walked by. Thankfully, the old C-64 was able to provide me with an adequate simulation that I could run in the comfort of my house.

In Lemonade Stand you are the proprietor of your very own lemonade stand (duh). You have a sum of starting money, a weather report, and a shopping list. You need to determine how many lemons, how much sugar and how many cups you need to buy, as well as what what you want to charge for a cup of your swill.

It’s all a balancing act, you can sell more sweet lemonade than unsweet, but you can’t sell any lemonade without cups. You’ll sell more lemonade as it gets hotter, whether it’s sweet or not, and not so much in the rain, but the weather report may or may not be accurate (just like real life!). Your goal is to reduce expenditures and expand income in an effort to maximize profit… in a game geared toward children… that was actually fun.

Brilliant!