A while back I made a brief mention of a strange little game called Plok, but didn’t really do it justice.
I don’t remember the story very clearly, but I’m fairly certain that it did exist. The… being known as Plok inhabits some island or other and all over this island are flags that were placed on the flagpoles all over the place. His grandfather’s flag, an heirloom, was stolen and he has to get it back. Once he does, his island is taken over, so he has to somehow liberate it, too. Compelling stuff, eh?
Plok has the interesting ability to fire his limbs at his enemies. He gets them back once they hit their target… most of the time. Sometimes he has to use them to flip switches or sometimes they just kind of get lost. Arms are kind of not that big a deal, but once he loses his comically large legs, then he has a slightly tougher time moving around.
I saw the game a lot in Nintendo Power and EGM for several months before it came out, and once it finally did I gave it a look. Turns out that I was right. The game was pretty fun.
Problem was that the game was two other things: lengthy and difficult. Neither one of those things would be too bad, except that the game has no save mechanism. No passwords, no battery backup, no nothing. So you have to finish the game in one sitting. That’s kind of a tall order since once you know what you’re doing finishing the game can take a couple of hours. And if you don’t know and are only renting the game for 24 hours? Well, then you can make it to about stage 4 out of… way more than 4.