No choice in the matter; this isn't a level select screen.
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.
And what on earth is that on the platform above me?
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 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.
Tiny clocks keep pouring out of the archway while I try to recall whether there's anywhere I haven't yet been.
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!!
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.
Harlequin doesn't have lives, just continues. Continues that send you back to the overworld screen, through even more disk swapping.
Well, it's gone now. I hope I didn't need that to complete the level.
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'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'm relieved that this powerup triggered automatically and in the right place.
Medium question: Spot the bonus item.
Hard question: Spot the enemy.
He doesn't look like he's wearing a mask at all. He looks a bit like J.C. Denton in a chequered suit.
My three guardian fireworks do absolutely nothing to injure it. What could possibly be at the end of this corridor...?
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.
I'm playing this again right now as I remembered it being pretty decent, and it is very original.
ReplyDeleteThere 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.