Monday 19 December 2011

Harlequin (Amiga) - Guest Post

Here's an Amiga platformer called Harlequin! Folks say it's pretty cool!

"The harlequin is my friend. The harlequin will not bite me and throw me in the basement."

We're headed to Chimerica!

No choice in the matter; this isn't a level select screen.

DRAT! I've started off in front of a locked door!

Harlequin pees love all over it. No dice.

There's solid walls and not much else to the left or the right, so we're going up.

Up to jump. The guy can jump a long distance, but while I was standing on the lower platform, I could barely see the one I was jumping to. I've only just made this jump.

And what on earth is that on the platform above me?

Run awaaaay!

I banged into it from underneath during the jump, but our guy's got a health bar. Hooray!

Realising I was running out platform, I turn around and give him a concentrated dose of vitamin love. The monster explodes into clouds of pink dust.

There's no sound effects at all so you have to really be paying attention to tell when you've flicked the switch or not. Harlequin's jump is sort of floaty, so it's easy to pass over the switch accidentally. Here, it's really easy to see that you've activated the switch because the dark platform shoots off to the left and doesn't return for ages.

When did I pick up an umbrella? And how did I turn it on? More importantly, how do I turn it OFF?

There's loads of long jumps to make in getting to the top of this tower. Annoying little clock enemies constantly rain down from the ceiling, but thankfully getting hit doesn't knock Harlequin back at all. You can blow them up with love, but there's no autofire.

The top of the level. GOSH! The clock has stopped and there are no more platforms. Uhh...

Tiny clocks keep pouring out of the archway while I try to recall whether there's anywhere I haven't yet been.

Of course. I missed a switch. And the switch was floating way, way off in the sky off to the left side of the level. Guess what this opened?

Could be anything to do with the top of the tower? Did I have to go all the way up to check? Did I accidentally un-flick a switch causing one of the platforms leading to the top to disappear? Did I search for ages for that switch, turn it on and head back to the very top of the tower?

Much jumping later!!

The switch opened the archway at the bottom of the tower.

Heading to the overworld view and back takes a whole mess of disk swapping and not a small amount of loading.

Harlequin is unlike most other Amiga platformers; you might have noticed that it doesn't have points or a time limit and I didn't head to the right to begin. It's actually a kind of Metroidvania.

If I remember correctly, all of the levels in the game connect together, and switches can affect levels other than the one they're in. I'm praying that all the switches in the game are more useful in their 'down' state because otherwise I don't stand a chance. I could hit a switch and end up blocking off an exit several levels ahead or behind me and I wouldn't even know it.

Don't ask me what the overall objective is, I have no idea. I read a walkthrough for Harlequin once as a kid. Totally incomprehensible.

I wait in front of the teeth machine for the platform to come back down and the teeth machine kills me. Kaboom, I'm diamonds!

Harlequin doesn't have lives, just continues. Continues that send you back to the overworld screen, through even more disk swapping.

I've found a Space Hopper inside a present! Like the umbrella, I'm guessing it's a special power that you're supposed to use in a specific place to do a specific task, but they just keep bloody turning on by themselves. They don't last forever and they don't seem to reappear when I leave and reenter the screen.

Well, it's gone now. I hope I didn't need that to complete the level.

I'm swinging across a massive chasm.

I lost track of how many attempts it took to get the fool to actually cling on to the ball instead of passing through it. He's steerable in mid-air when he misses, but he's not slick like Wiz from Wiz 'n' Liz. He seems to have two horizontal speeds: way too fast and way too slow.

Falling down the chasm doesn't hurt (he loses a pixel of his health bar from falling damage), but the jumps back up to the swinging balls are incredibly difficult.

I was wary about jumping on these gears. Rotating platforms are good, but giant spinning, spiky, shiny things are usually bad. These gears lead to a series of platforms that go across the chasm I just swung across. I fell down, fell through some enemies along the way, and exploded when I hit the ground due to falling damage. Disk swap time!

I made my way back to this point from the start of the level and only just managed to catch the swinging ball before this brown snakey thing shoots out of the left side of the screen, narrowly missing me.

I'm still thinking about Wiz 'n' Liz. Everything in that game slides around freely. Harlequin's got a lower framerate and nothing seems to 'slide', but 'grind' instead.

I fell off those platforms next to the gears AGAIN and by sheer good fortune landed right next to another level exit. We're off to 'The Dream Mile'!

I don't know what you guys think you're doing, but you fly through the air near me and you'll feel the wrath of my love stream.

Aha, what is that I see, leading in an anti-clockwise direction? A series of one game-block wide floating platforms! I'm optimistic!

I'M DROWNING!!!!

Oh no, wait, I'm a fish.

I'm relieved that this powerup triggered automatically and in the right place.

Easy question: Spot the Harlequin.

Medium question: Spot the bonus item.

Hard question: Spot the enemy.

Right, uh, that is the fifth and LAST time I'm going to try and jump on those platforms.

Lots of slopes in this place, but my guy sticks to them instead of sliding down them.

He doesn't look like he's wearing a mask at all. He looks a bit like J.C. Denton in a chequered suit.

This place sure is windy!! Can't you see the dozen pixels of white?

The leftmost exit of that level lead me to this underfloor passage in The Clockworks! I must have gone around the outside edge of the whole tower. There's that damn teeth machine AGAIN.

My three guardian fireworks do absolutely nothing to injure it. What could possibly be at the end of this corridor...?

It was a useless dead end. I'm not starting again. Not a chance.

Harlequin isn't a good game. It could be though, with a couple of minor changes. Harlequin would be a good game...

If I knew what the hell I was supposed to be doing. If I could control him in mid air better. If I could control when the umbrella and Space Hopper powerups activated. If he could grab onto close platforms instead of falling through everything. If I didn't have to manually go back through levels I'd already walked through. If I could see on the map screen how the levels I'd played relate to one another. If I had infinite lives. (Wait, aren't I describing James Pond 3?)

Do these guys not look at other platformers before making their own? Do they not play their own game to see what's wrong with it?

In my head, a platform game typically starts off with wide open spaces, easy to reach platforms and an obvious exit. There might be extra hidden stuff such as bonuses set across sequences of moving platforms, but a blundering idiot should be able to get to grips with how the game thinks just by holding the joystick to the right. Whoever laid out Harlequin decided to start the game with the hard levels with the nearly unmakeable jumps above gaping chasms across moving platforms. The Clock Tower, The Clockworks and The Dream Mile are not Super Mario Bros World 1-1, Green Hill Zone or Wizzy's House.

In a late, stop-the-presses news flash, I've been told that Harlequin lets you save your game when you're on the map screen! I can't think of many Amiga platformers that do that. You have to have a formatted disk ready, but it's there. I don't remember Donk having anything like that. Good luck getting it to work though. You put the wrong disk in at the wrong time or just look at the Amiga funny and it'll reboot and you'll be right back at square one.

1 comment:

  1. I'm playing this again right now as I remembered it being pretty decent, and it is very original.

    There is a lot of clever stuff in this game, although it can be frustrating. There are good rewards if you have the patience to get through the annoying bits and save regularly, using a keyboard on an emulator helps as well as its easier to avoid the accidental up & fire and down & fire combos that make the umbrella & space hopper work.

    The main problem of the game is that it's quite easy to miss a switch or section of level and end up lost without a clue what to do next, so you have to make sure to fully explore every level each time you find it, and it is non-linear so you sometimes have to revisit old levels. The game does get better once you get past the first couple of levels though.

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