I tried out Golvellius for a few minutes the other day and liked what I saw. Turning the overworld into a series of maze-dungeons punctuated by actiony stages is an interesting choice. Some of the enemy patterns seem a bit hard to deal with tho. Definitely feel like I should restart and make a map along the way.
The fact that you can turn around in the sidescrolling stages is funny once you consider the fact that the SMS doesn’t support sprite flipping.
I much prefer the PSG music to the FM music. I’ve always loved how Compile made square waves sound.
The way the game is structured (namely, each map square has one cave) rewards this methodical map-making approach. Felt therapeutic, in a way.
I kinda wish that this was a two button game or that quest items were more useful outside of the overworld context, but it all works well enough for what it is. At the very least, I’m actually wishing this had gotten the Sega Ages treatment.
I think it’s funny that the game has 4 (four!) different modes of movement:
The overworld (4-way grid-aligned movement, 4-way attacking)
Autoscrolling caves (8-way movement (slow diagonals), forward-only attacking)
Boss battles (8-way movement, 4-way attacking)
Sidescrolling caves (2-way movement + jump, forward-only attacking)
yeah, that part gave me some trouble too. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually as a kid, but I gave up after a while and peeked at a guide (for shame, RT).
I searched “golvellius 3d” to see if anybody had made a 3d rendition of its overworld (like I’ve seen with various zelda games), and instead found footage of this decade-abandoned fangame:
master of darkness was a game everyone would talk about whenever the master system was brought up, long long ago. it’s pretty good.
so is kenseiden. kenseiden has a de-samurai-sed version especially for korea, too, which is moderately interesting.
try my hero, too. it might not be good, but it’s kind of interesting.
me and my friends used to find alex kidd in high tech world equally hilarious and baffling. we never got past the first stage, but the many strange ways you can die are pretty entertaining in their own right.
Hi Tech World gets even more baffling when you get out of the castle, suddenly it becomes a terrible one hit kill platformer, then you get to a village where Alex can die by eating too many hotdogs. If you pray to the gods 50 times they give you a pass so you can go play OutRun
Dragon Crystal is one game I can think of that benefits from being on lower spec hardware to it’s 16bit counterpart. The lower screen resolution makes movement feel faster than Fatal Labyrinth which feels sluggish in comparison. Also the PSG music is much more evocative than the boring dinky tunes in FL
dunno what you’ve played but i have golden axe warrior on my list, as well as asterix and of course a revisit of phantasy star
still wanna keep working on getting farther in choplifter, that game is a joy to play - i’ve only made it to aircraft carrier level so far, which is hard as nails
oh yeah PSYCHO FOX - gonna try and work on that at some point too
The SMS has 16k of VRAM shared between tiles, the background, and sprite data (the color palettes are stored separately). That 16k is enough for 512 tiles with 4 bits per pixel (whereas the NES is 2bpp). However, since the tiles and background share the same memory the effective amount of usable tiles is around ~448.
One neat thing that I noticed Golden Axe Warrior does is that it uses the unseen rows of the background as tile data (which it can get away with since the game doesn’t scroll). The garbage at the bottom of the BG here is the same data as the hero’s sprite at the bottom row of tiles:
The hero’s tiles are updated every frame you move.
(As for the game itself, I just messed around with it enough to say “wow this is fast” and “wow nice variable width font”)
Another thing of note is that the sprite data (i.e. the data for sprite positions and stuff) can technically be used as tiles on the background. Golvellius accidentally does this in one place, where we get this beauty as a cave entrance:
The weird motion and flickering of that tile is just the game’s sprite cycling routine doing its thing.
