Uses Famtasia 5.10 patched
- Uses death as shortcut
- Aims for fastest time
- Uses warps
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- No predefined saves
- Genre: Puzzle
- Genre: Adventure
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.
Processing.