Submission #352: Bag of Magic Food's FDS Eggerland in 36:16.05

Uses Famtasia 5.10 patched

This was the first Lolo game for Famicom, but I believe it was actually a port of the second Eggerland game, also known as "Meikyuu Shinwa", for MSX. This game combines traditional Lolo puzzle-solving elements with some of the adventure elements of The Legend of Zelda. You dodge enemies, collect heart framers, and grab a key out of a treasure box to clear the room as usual, but now the rooms have multiple exits and are connected in a large overworld instead of being presented sequentially. An exit from a cleared room serves as an entrance to a new room. But not all entrances to new rooms allow Lolo to properly solve the puzzle, so the player runs into a lot of "can't get there from here" situations. There are also rooms where you can get a raft from the treasure chest to sail into the next room. The raft disappears as soon as you step back onto dry land, but a new raft will appear from an open treasure box. There are even rooms where you can unlock a secret item or ability through a process hinted at by the question mark box. In many cases these secrets are necessary for beating the puzzles!

You'll notice that I reach the final stages from a hub room labeled "KEY 5". This means I need to collect the 5 keys from the timed sand mazes that appear when I clear certain rooms. Less obvious is the fact that there are four more timed mazes which unlock the powers of the four gods required to beat the final stages--double speed, infinite magic shots, and tree-cutting. You need to push a certain emerald framer in the rooms they're in to make the entrances appear, however. Fortunately, these rooms are warped to from the four rooms connected to "KEY 5" as a bit of a hint, as well as a handy shortcut for speed runs.

The path I chose ended up using only one of those warps (and a good thing, too, because it skips some more of those boring rafting stages), but I found another sort of "warp" based on a programming error to keep this movie from ballooning to an hour. You see, Lolo can still blast an egg with a magic shot while he's stepping onto it, and once he finishes stepping onto the water tile, the game teleports him onto the flying egg. You can make him step off the egg somewhere in the room and keep playing as normal, or you can ride the egg all the way to the room edge. For some reason, the egg trick can only be used to warp to rooms north and west of the current one--going south or east simply kills Lolo when he hits the wall.

And if you use this trick to go west at the western edge of the map, you end up in a room on the eastern edge of the map, one row up, demonstrating that the room numbers are really stored sequentially. I take advantage of this early on to save some time going after the second key. I also went off the west edge of the overworld late in the game, but that wasn't the egg glitch; that was just a level designer's oversight in giving the player three bridges on an island three squares away from the west edge.

Another quirk of the egg glitch is that when you get into the new room, if you push in a direction where Lolo is blocked, he teleports onto a particular enemy in the room. And for some reason, the first step Lolo takes is always 16 pixels, rather than the standard 8. Probably residue from the egg-riding routine, but it came in handy by teleporting me onto harmless enemies to finish the levels faster.

You might notice that the enemy AI isn't nearly as good as it is in later Lolo games. The most useful flaw is in how the Don Medusa checks for alignment with Lolo. With the right timing, I can walk past Don Medusa without him caring at all!

I used suicide as a shortcut to get a raft trapped behind a stupid one-way pass because that was the only way to make my overworld path work. Death transports Lolo to the default entrance of the last cleared room he left, or to the room he started in if he hasn't left it yet.

And a little warning if you try to time-attack this yourself: There's a bug in the sand maze timer that causes the first second of a maze to be shorter, depending on when you enter it. Sometimes the first second is too short for the player to be able to finish the maze! If you encounter this, try waiting outside the entrance some number of frames before you go in.

I put a lot of work into this movie, so any improvements that could be made are probably very minor. (Style is one issue I could work on, I know, sorry.) One of the biggest variables in completing a level fast is enemy movement, which I have to influence with Lolo's relative position. (This is the main reason you'll see Lolo "hesitating".) Some puzzles just have so many different ways of being solved that finding the best way is practically impossible.

So all in all I think this is an entertaining movie. But I encourage other players to try the game and play it all the way through! See if you can find the map or the secret 1-up flowers. Better yet, see if you can find a better time attack path! It's fun!

Bisqwit: Excellent! The time you first used the egg-riding glitch was kind of a jaw-dropper for me.
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