The dumb thing that put Goonies in my mental map is Jeremy Parish occasionally mentioning Jetpack Goonies–his lifelong fantasy project:
Whoa, there’s an unused Ma Fratelli sprite in the game.
http://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/thegoonies/
The secrets never end…
This is a good thread. Thanks for starting it.
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There are a few panty/upkirt shots.
As a child of the 80’s there is nothing more invigorating than an 8-Bit Konami rendition of a Cindi Lauper tune.
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This is a sensibility that Milon’s Secret Castle also has, I think.
What’s especially interesting to me about this is that everything about the cutesie and neat graphical style suggests a straightforward, baldly linear game, so there’s this little strain of tension between surface suggestions and what (once you’ve played long enough) the level design comes to actually suggest, which is that secrets are in fact everywhere.
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Good call. Have always been intrigued with Milon. Hadn’t made the connection.
My friend had Milon’s when I was a kid, and I found it absolutely maddening. Back then, I wanted a polished, directed experience. I wanted the game to tell me what it wanted out of me. Now, I’ve basically come completely around to the other side and desire mystery more than anything.
That said, I do think a game where you shoot bubbles at basically every tile on the screen in order to find a hidden secret isn’t so much “mysterious” as “obtuse” and, occasionally, “tedious.” There is a difference.
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I liked every part of Metroid Fusion except the actual level design and flow. Very quickly it turned into the Samus Tile Hunt Mystery Game. Which tile do you have to shoot to exit this box? Which weapon must you use? Try them all!
So, yeah. I get that. I haven’t gotten far enough in Milon to get what it’s doing enough for it to bother me. I pick at it time to time, but am still in the whoa, what mode.
I picked up a Milon’s cart at the only used game store a while back, but it didn’t come with the manual, so I feel somehow even more lost trying to play it than I otherwise might. Seems like a good “play with a notebook” game, like that copy of Legacy of the Wizard I picked up at the same time.
I think MSX’s The Castle figures somehow into this topic, although I am not entirely sure how.
Yeah. I count Milon’s Secret Castle among games like Simon’s Quest, Metroid, or Metroid 2: games I like thinking and writing about, or watching being played if I’m in the right mood, but which I don’t get much out of playing because of the highly repetitive, bordering on monotonous, and obsessive-compulsive design elements.
I was wondering to myself whether Mickey Mousecapade for the NES fits into the lineage of games being talked about in this thread, and in the process I discovered one of the the more unexpected things hidden in an NES game I’ve ever seen. Who the hell actually looks inside of the cartridge for a secret? (look closely on the right):
As for the game itself, I think despite being an extremely brief licensed game (it can be beaten in about 12 minutes if you know what you’re doing) it bears mentioning in this thread, since I doubt people who didn’t encounter it in its day have any cause to know what the deal with it is now. It was released in Japan in 1987 and was also developed by Hudson Soft, a year after Milon’s Secret Castle came out there. The title screen below is a carry over from the Japanese name (you’ll notice the American name is actually Mickey Mousecapade and they didn’t bother to change it):
The first stage feels like a more approachable version of Milon’s, with its vertical, non-linear room structure and key hunt objective. The jumping and moving is much snappier though since it ditches Milon’s sludgy momentum. Unfortunately this is offset by the fast moving enemies and intense flickering that adds some unfairness to the proceedings. Your projectile does span the length of the screen in a straight path instead of tapering up and down, though, and the neatly bifurcated rooms in the first stage all have clear exits and entrances that make navigation much easier.
But even in the first stage the game makes its hostility toward the player obvious: before you can get your shooting star weapon from the first treasure chest, a chandelier drops on your head. This happens so quickly that it’s essentially unavoidable without foreknowledge. As a result you either test every chandelier in the rest of the level by moving a couple of pixels in and backing out, or simply accept that you’re going to soak damage from future traps. Opening treasure chests is beneficial, until a solitary chest springs a trap on you that is completely unavoidable–or you might get Minnie’s star weapon out of it instead, which tips the balance of combat so far in your favor that it’s essential to beating the game without losing your sanity. Whether or not you get the extra star shot or the trap is completely random, and the game never explains any of it to you. It especially doesn’t explain that you can exit the room and continue to retry the chest!
The manual tells you about it, but doesn’t actually account for the trap. I recalled that the manual had some advice on how to find it, so I looked it up, and I was shocked to read it 25 years later. Look at how the walkthrough to the bonus item takes up 1/3 of a page (the rest is left blank) and reads like someone giving you bad directions from a car window before wishing you luck half-heartedly. And as an adult I see that the reason they gave up is that the goddamn level select codes were sitting right there on the opposite facing page. I missed this detail because I asked my grandmother to read me the walkthrough out loud as I played the game, and she and I likely didn’t notice the text dump on page ten hidden under the controller diagram:
Within a few rooms of stage 1, you’ve already fought a bunch of different enemies in various combinations, some of which have strange rules that don’t make intuitive sense from a design perspective: spiders are invulnerable from projectiles until you walk near them to activate their patterns; they cannot be eliminated from a safe distance without bonus items. The dancing brooms from Fantasia bound quickly across the screen and can only be harmed on their handles, making the game feel briefly like the moments in Mega Man where you need to land projectiles mid-jump on a small hitbox while dealing with advancing threats.
Incidentally these dancing brooms are the first of a few Disney characters that show up inexplicably in their respective stages. Adding to that strangeness is the fact that many sprites were swapped for different Disney characters in the North American version for reasons no one seems to know. The Japanese release was called “Mickey Mouse: Adventures in Wonderland”, and had a lot of Alice in Wonderland enemies in it. I guess someone at Capcom or Disney took umbrage with that, and so the Alice connections are mostly (but not totally) removed: The first boss, the Cheshire Cat, is swapped with a character that the manual calls “Wizard” even though he looks an awful lot like a witch, and it’s a decision that causes the stage’s cat motif to make less sense than it should. At least I understand why Capcom edited out the screen-clearing bonus item: it was a cameo by the Hudson Bee.
I haven’t mentioned that Minnie follows behind Mickey on a delay. While she’s invulnerable to damage from enemies, you’ll eventually discover that if you’re not careful, her programming causes her to get separated from Mickey, making it impossible to switch rooms and progress until you rejoin her. Adding to the hassle is that her presence also creates a lot of visual confusion when tracking Mickey (the only hurtbox that matters), especially when there’s lots of enemies and projectiles flying around the screen. Fortunately she can be an asset if you have her shot, since you can maneuver her to places where she can shoot while Mickey hides. It’s not an intended mechanic, but figuring out is the most satisfying moment in the game.
Oh, and there are invisible items everywhere that can only be revealed by shooting at them (repeatedly) once you accidentally discover one by blindly shooting. These are always invisible, except for a single one that they decided to mark graphically by showing it in the form of a pin holding window shutters down (at least that’s what I think it is, it’s sort of hard to tell what some of the sprites are supposed to represent in the game). You would think that all of these items would be beneficial, until you hit bad luck and run into the crow that steals Minnie. You need Minnie to exit the stage and progress, and the only way to get her back is to find another invisible cache that contains a passage to a secret room.
The secret room is a creepy statue gallery, and you can only get Minnie back by guessing correctly which statue is the real Minnie. If you’re wrong, you have to find the room again to take another guess, and endure the nightmare of seeing this screen again (I thought I managed to forget it forever, but writing this post forced me to look it up).
So aside from that, the actual crazy thing that happens after the first stage in this game is that it completely drops most of the expectations it sets up when you’re learning the game during the next three stages.
Stage two is linear and full of bottomless pits, giant ocean waves with jellyfish that dog you every step forward, and clusters of enemies that convene right where you want to land. This is also the stage where you discover that Minnie is actually a huge liability–if she falls into the sea, Mickey jumps in after her, per their suicide love-pact. So you need to clear all of the jumps with both of them, or start the stage from the beginning. Oddly, the stage is seemingly barren of items or pickups compared to the first stage, which was overflowing with them. So with all of the damage you’ll probably take, surviving the boss is difficult, even though the stage is extremely short. That is, until you discover that the designers have generously hidden a single health pickup in the most difficult to reach area in the level. It requires you to first discover it on accident, then stand on the platform just past it, taking care not scroll the screen too far so you can shoot and reach it.
Stage three goes off in another direction. This time you are in a forest, and there are enemies everywhere to harass you: extremely aggressive birds (insects?) that chase you to the ends of the earth, mushroom people (again from Fantasia) that jump in odd patterns like Fleaman from Castlevania, giant bears throwing who-knows-what at you, as well as scorpions and plants that shoot projectiles at you. I’m also pretty sure I’m also missing an enemy in that list. I recently read that the game just outright borrowed enemy sprites from other Hudson games, so that would account for the density of left-field enemies in what is otherwise a short game.
Anyway, the hook of the forest stage is that doors appear in trees that line the background. If you continue to walk to the right, you will always loop back to the “Start” post, so you need to find the right tree to enter while not buckling under the constant, ongoing assault. The big problem is that some (if not most) of the visible doors loop you back to the beginning, and at least one of the doors needed to progress is completely hidden until you shoot it into existence. By stage three, you might forget that shooting hidden things is an option because stage two is incredibly simple and mostly drops the motif. The only way to know that you’re making progress is that the season changes suddenly when entering the correct door (spring/summer/winter/fall) implied by the swapping of the stage palette. What the hell is going on with that? Have Mickey and Minnie entered a place where the rules of time and space have shifted, with months passing in minutes or not at all? I hope so.
Stage 4 is only four screens long, and remarkable because Pete is actually throwing honest-to-god knives at Mickey and Minnie. For some reason, Capcom left this detail in the game, but saw fit to edit out Mega Man-esque energy bullets that your characters shot in the Japanese release, changing them to the fun-looking star projectiles instead. Just as curious, the American cover art depicts at least some of this extremely short level and there is a strange detail in it that vexes me:
In both versions of the game you rescue Alice, but in the American version you’re not told that you’re rescuing her–this is something you figure out at the end of the game. Because Wonderland references are removed, the only real clues are on the box: the footsteps leading down off of the site of the boat into the ocean (they clearly don’t belong to anyone else depicted on the box) and the insistence in the manual that a mysterious voice has called out to Mickey and Minnie. The cover of the game, coupled with the stage it depicts, strike me as oddly sinister given the actual reveal.
Eventually you get to the final stage, which is really just an amped-up version of the first stage, but taking place in a castle. The verticality returns, as do the non-linear arrangement of the rooms and platforms (which become stranger), and the key/lock mechanic reappears. Why the whole game wasn’t just an extended take on this concept after it was introduced early on, and how it became a bunch of half-explored vignettes in its middle stages, I don’t think anyone really knows. I still find this game really interesting to think about 25 years later, and it’s brevity is probably the only thing that makes it penetrable.
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this is even stranger when you take into account the fact that world of illusion, released 4 years later is another mickey mouse game that has a lot of alice in wonderland stuff in it, and went unchanged for the west
The secrets are in the castle. Or is the castle itself secret?
Yes! Mickey Mousecapade. Played the hell out of this when it was new. Really am not motivated to do it again, ever. But I think it’s a really good example of the form, particularly in the inside levels.
The circuit board… wow.
I like how the manual just goes and gives out the level select code. Did any other NES manual do something like this? I recall quite a while later seeing this code printed in gaming magazines as a secret and thinking, no, guys. Everyone who owns the game knows this already…
Incidentally, considering Milon and Adventure Island (though of course the latter is all Westone), Hudson seems really big on hidden shooty item syndrome. Of course they’re not alone in that, but… hmm. Bomberman has a bit of this too, doesn’t it.
https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/courses/148F-0000-018E-29A2
I just wanted to bring this Mario Maker level up because it feels like an homage to this style of design. It’s got tons of secrets, many that are either humorous or totally pointless. The difference is that it feels fair and funny instead of mysterious and vexing, but I think it still has the same air of “there’s more going on here” than most games do now
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Vexing. I love that word.
I’m sort of… you know, Mario Maker should have existed thirty years ago. I actively wondered in the early NES days why I couldn’t edit Super Mario Bros. the way I could Lode Runner and Wrecking Crew. Later it seemed like an obvious feature when the game was ported to the SNES, and I actually expected it would be there. Then it’s literally one of the first things I thought of when I heard about the DS. The Wii U feels like it’s… kind of past the time when this would have had its best impact. It’s like Nintendo is shrugging and saying, whatever. We’re done with this now. Out of ideas. You do whatever with it.
Back a little closer to the topic, I think actually this weird hidden aspect – which is just one of the elements that I think defines the experience of The Goonies – is probably why I am so drawn to opaque games like Simon’s Quest. Anything could be anywhere! There’s no telling whether people are telling you the truth or not. Or whether you’re understanding them correctly. Stuff like the second quest in Zelda, with its new twists on the rules, and the minus world glitches and Metroid wall-door tricks – this is prime Video Game stuff to me. It’s all the room between the known pieces of the world, where anything could exist.
EDIT: Which may or may not partially explain this:
I hadn’t quite put The Goonies together with all of this, but of course it fits.
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One hell of a Hidden Mickey! This is a great thread.
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Suddenly I regret selling my copy of Mickey Mousecapade 20 years ago
To me, a difference between the original Goonies and The Goonies II is the difference between Wonder Boy in Monster Land and Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap. They’re both nonlinear from moment to moment, but whereas WB3 slots roughly into what we now consider a “Metroidvania” in the sense that it’s an open world that you jump and climb around as you earn abilities that help you to explore further, WB2 is essentially linear in structure. As such, it has a sort of momentum missing in a totally open game.
Although you feel a freedom to explore and make your own decisions, there’s never a moment when you’re forced to backtrack extensively, or figure out what to do where. You never have that bubble-bursting moment of “So what am I meant to do now?” where you’re forced to pick through the world and try everything you can think of until the game lets you move forward.
This, and some other recent discussions I’ve had, is leading me to think more about guided game narrative. We’re used to a sort of binary labeling system: either a game is linear, or it’s non-linear. For extreme examples we might use the term “open world”. In retrospect, obviously that’s not a very helpful way to talk about a game’s flow. Although this isn’t perfect either, it may be more representative to talk about short-term and long-term structure.
Nearly every game is nonlinear from one moment to the next, or else we’d have no liberty to make decisions, but it would be fair to call most music games and scrolling shooters linear in the short term. You’re free to make a few decisions to keep the game moving forward, but you have no real control over the game’s direction. For all its jumpy exploration, a game like SMB, that only scrolls in one direction, would also probably be described this way.
To contrast, a game like WB2 or The Goonies would be nonlinear in the short term because although you’ve got a good idea of where the game expects you to go and what you’re eventually meant to do, the game leaves it up to you how you’re going to get to that point.
Yet, in the long term both of these games are quite linear – so there’s not an easy parallel with Metroid or The Legend of Zelda, which are nonlinear in both short and long-term structure.
So, that’s the start of something, I guess. Though, it raises the question: are there any games that are linear in the short-term yet nonlinear in their long-term structure? What would this even describe? Games with branching paths?
EDIT: It may even be more helpful to break things into three “acts” – short-term, medium-term, and long-term. An “open world” game would be nonlinear in all three ranges.
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