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Obscure, Unloved SMS Games

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
Hang on. Your dude is blue on a sea of blue tiles? That's... not the best visual design.

I had it in my head that this was more of a first-person dungeon crawl, so the screenshots have done their job of helping me suss out what kind of game this is.
 

JBear

Internet's foremost Bertolli cosplayer
(He/Him)
I mean, presumably it's harder to lose track of your avatar when it's constantly in motion under your control.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
The colours haven’t come out very well in the photos. The player character is mostly white, the tiles are grey, and the three eye guys are blue. It’s clearer when you’re playing it.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
CzN1LmE.jpeg


Another rather poor photo: I finished the beginner castle. After a bit more of an attempt to figure it out myself, I looked up how to reach the last room. Turns out, I needed to strike a particular umbreakable tile three times to make a key appear. In fairness, this was in one of the rooms next to the room I couldn’t reach, and it only had eight unbreakable tiles in it to choose from, but really how was I supposed to figure that out? Doesn’t fill me with anticipation for facing the higher levels.

uOlMpYx.jpeg


Here’s a shot from the intro - the sorcerer flies overhead, dropping the hammer which the player character is about to pick up. You don’t actually face the sorcerer in-game, at least in the easier levels.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
K5z3Ukl.jpeg


Here’s my map for “Average” mode. Well, the left half. Here’s the rest:

jv8BVij.jpeg


I switched to A4 instead of A5 graph paper so I could use full squares for each map tile to make it easier to read, though in retrospect it would have all fit on one page at half size and I wouldn’t have had to draw so much. Anyway, it’s done now. The key to getting through this stage: cheating. It turns out there’s a code you can put in on the difficulty selection screen that lets you turn on infinite lives and turn off enemies. The interesting part of this game is not having to start over because you got cornered at the end of a narrow passageway you had to go down and lost your last life, so I have no qualms about using these. The no enemies option actually only removes the goblins, the dragons are still there.

With no need to avoid enemies I was able to make maps at my leisure, break whichever tiles I wanted, strike unbreakable tiles repeatedly looking for secrets (I think I only found one this way, and I found it before I turned enemies off), and not spend all my time retreading ground I’d already covered before game overing just as I was about to reach new territory like I’d been doing for a while before using the cheat. I still got stuck at literally the last hurdle and had to look up the solution: I couldn’t open the door to the room with the princess. It turns out there was an invisible item that’s only there after collecting a different item in the room to the left of the princess. I had stepped on the right tile on the way to collecting yet another item, but only before the invisible item was brought into existence. If I’d happened to collect the items in the room in a different order I would have gotten the invisible one, which causes the key to the princess’s room to appear.

Can I be bothered taking on expert? Presumably it’s going to be eight screens by eight screens, almost double the number of rooms that average’s 6x6 square had. That’s too big again for my graph paper, plus a lot of drawing. Maybe I’ll give it a shot in an emulator and stitch a map out of screenshots.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
Expert is pretty nuts. There’s an old guide on the internet with walkthroughs for the first three difficulties and a partial guide to expert because the author got stuck and couldn’t finish. There’s also a more complete guide that someone made by looking at the ROM to figure out what exactly you need to do to reveal each secret. So far I haven’t used either for expert, though I used the former for the one thing I was stuck on in beginner and the latter for what I was stuck on in average. I’m hoping but by no means confident I’ll be able to get expert on my own. I’m playing with infinite lives turned on and enemies turned off, and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could beat the game without those two changes.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of my map to hand but I’ve moved to an emulator on PC and have stitched my map together out of screenshots. To those screenshots I’ve added secrets as I reveal them along with what I did to reveal them (usually either collecting something, dropping some tiles, or striking particular tiles repeatedly). I’ve been pretty thorough about trying all my methods to reveal things, so it’s pretty slow. Even so I might have missed stuff - in at least one room dropping all the tiles at once didn’t reveal a secret but just dropping the middle section did, and I can’t be sure I haven’t missed more of those. My map might also be incomplete because I wasn’t bothering to record secret reveals that only gave treasure, and I’ve since realised that some of those treasures might have revealed other secrets on different screens. For the first half to three quarters of the map it seemed like every secret directly connected - I dropped a tile and a treasure appeared, then I picked up that treasure and a key appeared. Then I hit a room in which dropping all the tiles made a blank tile appear, which I had not seen before. I brought back the tiles and walked over the one that appeared and a sound played. What did it do? Hard to say, but I’ve since noticed a bunch of treasures that weren’t previously there in rooms I’ve already visited. I suspect walking on that blank tile either made those all appear or it made one of them appear, and collecting it made the next appear, and so on. On my map these are all marked with question marks. I also found a room with like six or seven keys all in a row, none of which opened any doors in that room. I’m hoping they’ve opened doors to some of the areas I haven’t been able to reach yet.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
mgbQpHY.jpeg


I did it! Almost! Once again I had to look up one thing before I could finish this final mode. Man that’s frustrating. Here’s my map:

GWWwToR.png


I’ve just realised that the bottom left screen is brighter than all the others. I think that’s because one of the keyboard shortcuts in the image editor I used is also the shortcut for changing the brightness in the emulator I used. Anyways, this map shows all the screens of expert mode, and I have attempted to overlay directions for revealing all the secrets. I don’t expect anyone to be able to read it (the screen second from the bottom and second from the right, for example, is pretty complex) and I’m not sure it would work for me if I were playing the game again, but making it as I went along got me through.

The one thing I didn’t get is in the room second from the left and third from the bottom, where the ring is. You have to reveal three hidden treasures, each of which reveals another hidden treasure when you pick it up and those second three treasures form a bridge to the platform with the ring. I got two of them, one by dropping all the tiles in the room at once, and the other by repeatedly striking the centre-left tile in the top row. The third required dropping the third tile in the third row by itself. I didn’t figure that one out. I think it’s the only tile in the game that has to be dropped by itself to reveal a secret.

I would be really curious to know if anyone has ever beaten this game without guides. The person who made the guide I used made it by hacking the ROM to figure out what did what, so I guess they didn’t technically use a guide. Anyway, I can put the cartridge back on the shelf now.

How great are all those little pictures in the file layouts?
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Man, this thing seems like it has the seeds of a really good game in it. Make the secrets less completely bonkers, maybe add some sort of hint system, and have a friendly lives/continues system, and you’d be a lot of the way there. Auto-map option would also be good if you’re not in a map-drawing mood… or maybe Etrian style where you can mark things on your own.

And of course it’s also the sort of thing that would be really easy to add a level editor to for infinite content!
 
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