Super Panda Adventures (PC) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest poster mecha-neko has returned to write about a game with the best title. It's literally 'Super Adventures', except with a panda in it! Now I just need to find a science fiction movie called Ray Hardgrit's Sci-Fi Cat Adventures so I can manipulate him into to writing my other site for me as well.

Also I realise that this was published on a Wednesday, not a Monday, but mecha-neko has a fondness for his banner and I didn't have the heart to tell him he couldn't use it. I guess you could read it on a Monday if that works better for you.

Hello everyone! I hope the new year is treating you well!

Hmm... hands up who'd like to see a brightly coloured platform game about a loveable panda!

Developer:

Paul Schneider, BlueEagle Productions

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Release Date:

23rd April 2013

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Systems:

Windows

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With a title like that, how could I possibly resist?

Let me tell you how I ended up with Super Panda Adventures.

Once upon a sometime, I espied upon someone's Steam account a game called Zooloretto.

And I thought "Gosh, a platform game about a cartoon panda. I could totally get behind this, and I know somebody who likes cute panda games who'd like it too! This is perfect!"

Zooloretto, unfortunately for me, turned out to be an adaptation of a board game where you run a zoo. Cute, but not a platform game. That sort of let the wind out of my sails a bit.

So I asked Ray if Steam had any completely panda-themed games at all, and there was just one: Super Panda Adventures. And it was on a weekend special offer at that exact time for 49p. Clearly it was fate.

Say hello to Fu! He's a panda standing in front of the wackiest* cartoon houses I've ever seen, and he's totally ready to have a Super Panda Adventure! Relaxing, mellow music plays. And the rays of the sun slowly rotate in the distance.

There was no intro, and no attract screen appeared while I left the nice title music on. I'm just a panda, and that's super.

* Make that the second wackiest set of houses. But I warn you not to look at Cartoon Bubsy's house (or any part of that damn show) (external link) without eye protection.

Standing here, two things are apparent. First, the vast area of gauges and gadgets below indicate that this game might be a bit more sophisticated than simply running to the right. And secondly, I can't run to the right! My way is blocked by crates!

Let's talk to this fellow with the exclamation mark above his head.

Hello there! I don't know who you are, but apparently I'm called Fu! Good name for a panda. (Wikipedia informs me that in Chinese it means 'good fortune'!)

And also today is my 'special day'!

To which news Fu reacts the only reasonable way.

Yay!

Fu is a panda knight who has been training hard to earn the right to become the bodyguard of the mysterious Princess Maya. This is his special day because Master Wushu believes he's ready to take on the responsibility for real! Yay indeed!

But Fu, being the silly soul that he is, has managed to misplace his sword. And without that he's not going to be able to defend anyone from anything! Despite his appearance, Fu isn't much of a bear-knuckle fighter. (Sorry.)

So begins my first quest: head into the forest and retrieve my training sword.

But first, let's have a little look around.

Fu's village is full of adorable animal folks to talk to.

Aww... this is what I want from a game about a cartoon panda! I want everybody to be lovely and nice to one another!

Fu is enthusiasm in fuzzball form, and his only desire is for everybody else to be as happy as they can possibly be.

Alas, without my training sword, I'm hemmed in on all sides by unbreakable crates and I'm not able to jump high enough to escape. Unusually for a panda, I can't climb trees! I thought that would be a very panda thing to be able to do, but the only way out is this ominously Shadow of the Beast-like doorway.

A world map!

They've kept it nice and simple for me. A very hastily constructed 'No Entry' sign blocks the way further north, possibly to stop Fu getting into any more mischief than he already does.

I can either return to Bamboo Village... or dare to enter Blobby Forest.

I've found a shield! Hooray!

With this I can venture onwards with impunity...

...and immediately splat on the near invisible thorns directly to the right of it and take tons of damage in a glorious burst of pixelly particles.

The damned thorns somehow simultaneously blend into the trees in the background from being the same colour, yet also look like the shield powerups because they're shield-shaped and blink green!

The shield works like Doom numerical armour: absorbing a percentage of the damage that would otherwise reduce my regular health. But it also reduces a lot more damage and takes less durability damage if I use it to defend myself actively instead of relying on it passively... (Perhaps Fu has temporarily ingested the shield and is using it like a protective endoskeleton - a rare panda skill.)

Dancing flowers! Don't trust 'em!

All of these greens and browns and dark greens are reminding me of something else. Perhaps a more sedate Bubba 'n' Stix, but with much more boxy graphics.

The Training Sword is mine at last. No thorn dare stand in my way now!

To my right there is a shiny citrine crystal, just like the one in Bamboo Village. It glistens and beckons to me, and... saves my game when I use it! Three separate save slots, yeah! But no autosaves. Don't forget to use it!

The music is surprisingly not chiptune based. It's pleasant and well-produced is how I'd best describe it.

My standard attack is a Strider-like quick swipe, which I can execute in succession, like so! Fu can also charge up an attack, but it takes way too long and does barely any additional damage.

Alright. In this conspicuously large, rectangular, backgrounded room, I am ready to have my eggs scrambled by the inevitable first boss!

...

No boss appeared. It turned out to be evitable. I am safe!

But the room is a dead end, so it's time for me to safely head back to Master Wushu and begin my 'special day'.

Damn it!

Aaargh! When I walked past the innocent dancing flowers, they 'poofed' into a happy blob! A deadly happy blob!

Deadly happy blobs must be destroyed without hesitation. Swip-swap-swop, and the blob is gone.

With the training sword retrieved, I can return to Bamboo Village in anticipation of my ceremony. I sure hope nothing bad has happened to the village in my absence!

Nothing bad had happened to the village in my absence. That makes a nice change.

Fu is surprisingly astute and rather silly. It's really nice and endearing. He completely lacks attitude in any form. He doesn't twirl his sword or pose with it in his idle animation. He is, thoroughly, a good egg.

Fetch quest panda is sent off to accomplish a new mission. We're off to the Suspended Gardens!

I sure hope nothing bad happens to the village in my second absence.

In retrospect choosing to attack the block labelled with a bomb symbol at close range probably wasn't that clever. Nothing happened, but it was still dumb!

It's all go in the Suspended Gardens today; there's tons of enemies to slice up! The green blobs are back again, leaping out of the flowers as I pass, and they've brought these little blue witch doctory masked skull men with rocks as backup. Fu's got just the one attack button and, with no special abilities to his name except that excruciatingly slow and useless charge-up move, all I can do is rush forwards and hammer the button and have Fu relentlessly thrash the numbers out of his foes in a spray of fireworks.

I learned the hard way that Fu cannot jump on enemies. Well I say 'learned', but what I really mean is 'didn't learn and repeatedly attempted'.

There are the Loganberries!

And I've found Jenna the friendly Witch! She wants me to find her dog. Fu suggests that the dog has run off to the desert alone (as dogs do), and promises to help. Sadly I'm unable to follow through on Fu's promise since the desert's on the other side of the 'No Entry' barrier on the world map. All I can do is return to my surely perfectly fine innocent village and enjoy my 'special day' at last.

You know I'm starting to think this place is never going to be destroyed. I feel bad for even assuming it would. Fu and his friends don't deserve that.

I didn't have to backtrack through the entire Suspended Gardens level to get out: I could just walk off the screen with the witch on. But it does make me wonder why Fu had to enter in the centre of the level in the first place. Couldn't he have just used that side entrance to the Gardens all along?

This reads like I wrote it. And I don't mean this as an insult! I wrote very, very silly games when I was younger. This dialogue feels like it was written by somebody who was enjoying themselves, and didn't like to take things too seriously, but at the same time it doesn't smell like obnoxious post-modern know-it-all character dialogue.

There's no voice acting, which is possibly a blessing. Bad voice acting or lazy voice direction could have ruined everything. With no voice acting, impatient players can proceed as fast as they can read, and acres of wannabe Let's-Players can exercise their hilarious acting chops. Elsewhere.

With my sword and my Loganberries, I can defeat the crates that once blocked the way to the castle and meet Princess Maya at last.

Hey, Fu is friends with a ninja cat! That's awesome!

(The ninja cat is named Meow, by the way.)

If you try to talk to the cow, it goes 'MOOoooooiiiiooooohhhh' in the only speech sample in the entire game.

Here we are, Princess Maya's castle. And nothing has gone wrong!

Look at how happy Fu is when he jumps!

Awww...

Fu has become a warrior and finally met the lovely Princess Maya, who turns out to be an adorable panda princess. This is a lovely ending to this Super Panda Adventure. Can't we just end the post here?

Oh no.

No no no no.

Get 'em, Fu! Use your honourable swordsmanship and infectious optimism and make that shadowy robot pirate pay for ruining this wonderful perfect day!

Noooo! Fuuuuu!

Fuuuuu! I'm sorry!

I'm sorry I put the game on! I killed everybody! Everything was so nice and now it's all ruined!

The whole town is ruined and misty. Even the music is sad. The mouse guy and the ninja cat are gone...

... and Master Wushu is dying.

With his dying breaths, he reassures Fu that he has the strength to save the Princess, and tells him to seek out the help of the humans in tracking down the alien robot pirate. And then vanishes in a cloud of blue flickering dots...

But not before passing on some wisdom in the form of... a quote from The Matrix?

Um.

I'm free to explore more of the world now that I'm on a mission of redemption/vengeance. Redemgeance.

Wushu said to talk to the humans and although I expect Jenna will be very eager to assist her best fluffy pal Fu in his quest, she'll be much more inclined to help if I made good on the promise I made before being knocked unconscious for a week and finally found her lost dog.

To the Sunshine Desert!

Alright, I underestimated the game. I've been trained by daft games like James Pond 3 to expect that any place called a 'desert' will actually be a dessert in a confectionery-themed level in a hilarious unexpected swerve. But this is an actual desert, and I feel duly bad for doubting the game.

Hey, it's an angry bird.

One teeny little dog located. He's being a very good dog right now and not running all over the place and making me catch him like Baby Mario in Yoshi's Island. Like all non-enemy characters, I can't accidentally (or deliberately) hit him. And why would you want to?

Also now you can't not see his nose as a little triangular mouth with a single fang.

So far the levels have been very Turrican-ish. Run, attack, up, down, run, attack, knock numbers out of birds, jump about, fall down a hole, hit a switch, go through the obvious door. Fu lacks Turry's selection of kick-ass weapons, which is making things more aggressive and frankly dumber than I'd like. Even without Turrican's time limit, the size of the level is making me impatient and reckless.

It's only a short journey from the dog to the Beast door, but the reappearing enemies didn't make it easy. This time I didn't have any of the in-level health or armour refills to help me along since I'd already eaten them. Back in the Suspended Gardens, I now have to deal with these gunslingers as well, who seem at least two dozen hits to kill, each.

The worst part about this is that the enemies aren't even giving me XP. Sure, they occasionally drop a health potion, a shield, a mana leaf, or a SMALL XP, but it's very very rare, and the SMALL XP is worthless when it does appear. It feels like timewasting. In Faxanadu (which is a lot like Super Panda Adventures except very, very NES) every enemy gives you a big stack of experience points and as a result I started to look forward to slaying them.

One dog, back where it belongs.

Aagh. I can't stand to look at Fu. Fu isn't smug, doesn't make jokes, isn't consumed with anger, and is totally reasonable to everyone he meets. No human deserves to lay their eyes upon this overwhelming goodness.

Jenna offers her reward nevertheless.

Now Fu is a magic talking swordspanda! Wahoo! What more could you possibly ask for?

Jenna says she has another spell to teach me, but she'll need five Sparkleaves from the Eternal Tree in order to teach me. Lucky for her retrieving various items from distant places is my hobby, my calling and my special skill. I'll take the case!

Here we are at the Eternal Tree!

We've got light sources and stuff. Not much to say about it. Same enemies, lots of ledges. Same frustrating darkness effect.

The yellow crystal save points have been nice and frequent. And fast. No waiting around for zany recharging machines or madly rotating polygon coffins, just tap a button and you're solid. Be sure to do so, because the game doesn't auto-save when you exit to the map.

Hey, it's a bunny wizard!

I love this bunny.

He and I are on the same wavelength.

The bunny wizard asks me to meet him at his floating tower near Morella Mountain (which definitely sounds like a heaping stack of gateaux) to find his glowworm. (It's... glowing!)

These blocks aren't filled in! Someone call a plumber!

I can't jump high enough to ascend the interior of the tree, so I guess we're doing the glowworm thing first.

This freely-navigable map with its named locations takes me right back to PowerSlave, which is a game I'd really love to own my own copy of eventually.

Hey this is 'Morello' mountain, with an 'o' not an 'a'! That crazy wizard was crazy!

Today I learned that pandas can breathe indefinitely underwater. But only in computer games. Do not test this at home.

These crumbling platforms aren't so tricky, plus they come back after a second or two.

Quentin the crazy bunny wizard has locked himself out of his own floating tower! Now we'll never be able to get the glowworm. Not unless he helps me get inside using... magic!

He uses his magic powers and makes a single brick appear. Which I can't reach because I can only jump two tiles.

Fu is suitably unimpressed.

Fu, you crack me up.

This is something for later, perhaps. For now, let's go to Cherry Mountain Camp.

MIND BULLET slays enemies with a satisfying SPRILOINK sound effect, but like the sword it takes a fair few whacks to dismiss an enemy, and there are plenty of enemies.

And my mana regenerates! Slowly, but it's better than having to hunt for mana leaves in a crisis.

Attacking an enemy shows their health bar on screen, but not their name. That's a shame. I want to know the real names for these guys. Or perhaps I'm supposed to make them up, like players always used to?

I wish I could say more easily that this game was gripping me.

I'm making lots of linear progress, and there's lots of very predictable (and that's the good kind, as opposed to unpredictable) platforming and killing lots of monsters, but if you were to tell me you could easily tell that there's been a good wodge of travel taken place between this image and the previous, I'd first think you were telling porkies. And then I'd notice that I've levelled up, which happens surprisingly rarely despite the armies of bunny-masked aliens and jelly ghosts I've slain on my remorseless quest for vengeance.

I was wrong when I wrote about enemies not giving any XP earlier. Fu gains a small amount of XP based on the total amount of damage you manage to inflict in a continuous burst, which is labelled COMBO in the lower left. Taking damage doesn't interrupt the COMBO, so you're really encouraged to barge right on into groups of enemies and take them all on as fast as you can. Magic damage counts too, and is invaluable for continuing a COMBO when your next enemy is too far away to swipe, but you have to keep an eye on your mana.

Unfortunately, this doesn't really work for me. The XP reward curves upward sharply as you connect multiple kills together in a series, so a short COMBO is basically worthless, even at Level 1. Any game that provides bonuses for attacking multiple enemies in series almost instantly becomes entirely focused on the concept to the exclusion of all else, and since running out of enemies ends a run, you're severely punished for running out of enemies to fight - even though that's not something the player has any control over since they're placed by the game designer and free to roam about as they please. This reminds me a lot of Fable's experience point bonuses, on reflection. However, in Fable you had little circular clocks on screen indicating how long until your combo expired. Panda just squeaks at you without warning after a couple of seconds of non-violence, telling you you did badly and giving you nothing.

This area is one great big lasso shape: heading down, left, up and back to the entrance again with a delicious (but level-specific) Red Key.

And the Red Key leads to the camp proper, where I meet the strangest animal yet...

A regular guy! Hi, regular guy!

He's Tyler, a 'very bored adventurer', and he's more than happy to help me! Though he's not going to actually help help me, he's just going to criticise my wardrobe choices.

He thinks I'm not going to make much progress without better equipment, so he's sending me to the Crystal Cave to get a Power Orb so he can make me something more exciting than my simple leather belt.

The Crystal Cave is his name for the area to his left, not a location on the world map. Weird.

It is... more of what I got through to get to this point. Tiled ledges, little blue walking masked fellows, but there's annoying single-use switches that lead to special XP and money treasure that's only reachable for a split-second before it becomes inaccessible forcing you to repeat the stage if you want to not miss anything.

These cramped caves remind me of the Marble Zone and the Labyrinth Zone from Sonics 1 and 2. Both Sonic and Mario are more thrilling than Super Panda Adventure by far. In those games, you either have rings or a shield (or are big) or you don't. Two hits away from death. Careful play matters. Combat in Super Panda Adventures feels more like mashing action figures together and making 'bshhhh-bshhh' sounds over and over until something dies. The amount of forward progress I'm making is keeping the bogeyman of boredom away for now.

One unadventurous adventure completed and I have recovered the Power Orb. Tyler tells me to go to an Old Man (this one'll do), and the Old Man rewards me by giving me...

A cat-sized striped vest!

And a new character sprite!

To upgrade my sword, I'll need two Power Orbs.

Fu is devastated.

Yaaaay!

A great result, and everybody is very happy.

I think, honestly, I would rather play a game called Polite Panda Simulator than put my keyboard through more of this.

Let's see what I can do with the orbs.

Oh there's a pause menu? I was too caught up splatting everything in my path that I never looked.

Is there ever a pause menu!

There's a little bit of everything in here. We've got reminders for the various things I've been asked to do (talk to Tyler, find the Sparkleaves, find Quentin's glowworm), upgrades for Fu's armour and sword, spaces for Items (of which I have none), spaces for 'Relics' (also none), and sixteen of what the game calls 'Perks'. There's improved post-hit invulnerability, health recovery from attacking enemies, and more straightforward things like the ability to carry more health, armour or mana.

I've got ten points to spend on Perks right now (I assume two from each of my five Level Ups), but I'm reluctant to spend any because I've only discovered twelve out of the sixteen so far. As useful as an enlarged health gauge would be, the mana regeneration perk sounds even better, but what if there's an even betterer perk just around the corner? And these aren't 'Yes or No' choices, either: I can stack the same Perk multiple times. I level up so infrequently that a poor choice of Perks could really make things difficult later on. Given that this is a game made by just one guy (there's his name on the pause screen) the chances of the game having been fully played through with many different variations of Perks (or none at all) aren't high.

What's next, Tyler?

I can't bear to see Fu upset. He's so kind and wholesome. Please don't be sad, Fu.

Tyler says I should retrace my tracks and look for anything suspicious in the places I've already been. Anything more suspicious than the entire world being overrun by menacing tiny masked folks, that is.

And wouldn't you know it! There's a suspiciously boss-like suspicious flower in the suspiciously boss-like boss room next to the suspiciously boss-like save crystal, back in that first place I visited! Super Panda Adventures had the suspicious flower market locked down years before Undertale did.

When I approach the robotic flower morphs into a robotic blob and the (cool) music comes to life!

My strategy:

Whack the ever-loving snot out of it with everything I have all at once, starting with a furious barrage of a full tank of SPRILOINK.

With my magic expended and no mana leaves to be found within the arena, my only alternative is to try to chop the boss into little pieces very very fast.

Fighting a giant armoured metal sphere with a wooden sword is about as good an idea as it sounds. Fu's reach is minuscule and touching the blob regardless of whether it's attacking or not results in a lot of lost health. I'm having to lean on Fu's post-hit invulnerability a lot to get anything done and this keyboard is not going to be thanking me for the pummelling its getting.

I'm sure the boss has all the normal boss-like behaviours of fast moves, slow moves, lasers, slam attacks, and all that stuff you're supposed to observe and recognise and react to correctly, but... it just doesn't seem at all likely, really.

Fu can move while has the shield up, but can't attack. He doesn't have hefty animations for lowering and raising the shield so you could try to alternate between attacking and defending, but the enemies feel so unpredictable that it might be best to run into enemies with the shield up and deliberately use the invulnerability to get in a dozen hits. Fu loses a lot more health and shield for taking a hit unprepared than when he has the shield up.

Little by little, I drawn the boss' health meter until it anticlimactically vanishes in a puff of metal shards and leaves behind a single floating moon worth BIG XP... which doesn't even get me enough for a level up. Lame.

The real treasure is just beyond!

Legitimate Metroidvania-thing special ability achieved! Give him a big hand, everybody.

It's a nifty panda-sized grabby glove, inexplicably placed in a deep pit in a forest behind a door sealed and guarded by a killer alien pirate robot's robot blob flower.

Sorry, Ray. It may be called the 'Grappling Glove' but it's not a grappling hook.

Observe how the game puts you in a pit three tiles deep so you have to become accustomed to how the ability works in order to proceed instead of letting you walk away and only having to use it much later after forgetting you even had it. That's Game Design™, that is.

And just to be extra super sure, they put a room full of experience points and money behind a locked door you need the glove to get to...

with the key right beside it that you also need the glove to get to.

Now I can explore all the other areas more fully, like the Eternal Tree!

But I suspect I'm supposed to do this: return to the entrance, go past it and enter the previously inaccessible left side of this area, and explore the castle!

And encounter the worst kind of enemy in any game ever: the enemy that only lets you attack them when it wants to. Shield enemies can head right on back to Heck. Nothing should ever be invulnerable until it says so. They should be invulnerable until I says so.

Shield or no shield, he's still vulnerable to a good SPRILOINKing (it knocks numbers out of him, but it doesn't stun him or make him lower his shield), though magic isn't something I can spray freely because even with a few points into mana renegeration it's still a hefty wait between refills.

There's a suspicious machine here! That's even more suspicious than the suspicious flower, or the suspicious robot cowboys and suspicious masked shotgun stormtroopers that like to wander into the shot and shoot me in the back!

Can't do anything with this gizmo. Fu hasn't spoken up. Since I have all three coloured keys for this named area I guess that means I've done everything here?

And speaking of objectives, I think it's time for me to get those Sparkleaves, so I can give them to the witch and get that spell! I want more magic!

These groucho bots are very very strong. Everything is very strong.

This is on "Normal": the third difficulty out of five, on a scale from "Cakewalk", through "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard", up to "Ridonculous" (which made me giggle). I wouldn't advise going any higher unless you've got an autofiring joypad and/or a masochistic streak.

And speaking of joypads, this game supports DirectInput pads! That is, pads made before Windows 8 came out and ruined everything, like my collection of faux-DualShock pads and various retro controller adapters I have lying around. It's good that you can remap the controls freely because you might need to gradually move the attack command across the keyboard as you wear each key out.

In fact, I copied the game to my miniature TV PC and it works absolutely wonderfully there! It's as if it were made to be played with a pad in front of a TV. Well, that's not really true sadly. The TV PC is a weedy thing inside and it's not up to the full screen transparency effects that Super Panda Adventures uses. Nor at times was this GeForce GTX 750 Ti super-tower I'm using to get these screenshots. Even at its minimum resolution, the game needs some serious juice. I blame Steam.

The game's native resolution (which I've used for all of these screenshots) is 480x270, which is coincidentally two pixels shy of the PlayStation Portable's 480x272. The artwork in the game and menus is nice, clean, crisp pixels, which look nice here but which unfortunately all get pretty mangled if you run the game in any mode other than the minimum windowed resolution.

There's a selection of higher resolution graphics modes, but infuriatingly not one of them is an integer multiple of the default! As a result, the nice parallax scrolling backgrounds all ripple and shimmer as you move and everything looks a bit of a dog's breakfast. For some reason, the highest resolution modes not only mangle the game, but the menu graphics end up falling off the screen. Here's one example. Here's another. You'll just have to cross your fingers or live with it tiny.

Woah, they got me. This might be the first time I've died in the entire game!

You get one life! Crikey. At least there's infinite continues.

Funny, I must've just gotten so caught up in carving through the enemies that I stopped checking my health. Not that there's much I could've done about it if I had. The enemies reappear in previously cleared areas, so venturing back to health items that you may have left behind will get you ambushed by the reappearance of enemy formations that you've already defeated (except this time you're fighting through them in the reverse direction so they're not set up to be easily knocked down) and then you'll have to fight through the same few screens forwards again with whatever little health you managed to retain. I've found it's best to just keep going onwards, picking up everything you can as you go. You get full health on a Level Up but that happens so rarely that it's a (very welcome) miracle when it happens.

When you die, you reappear at the last crystal you saved at, exactly as you were. If you saved with low health, that's your problem. (Yep, fact fans, even Dark Souls gives you your health back and sends you on your way with a full case of Sunny Delight when you cop it, and you get a chance to reclaim your dropped experience. No such luck for pandas.)

It's good to know that Fu is keeping track of these leaves for me. The Eternal Tree keeps going up and up and the Sparkleaves are clearly marked, but it's still possible to miss one.

Going through a mysterious shortcut door back to the entrance that's only unlockable from up here...

It's lame, and it's slow, and it costs way too much mana to fire, but I now possess MEGA HAMMER.

Do not sully the good character and pleasant nature of this innocent panda with your preconceptions, judgements and insinuations, reader.

As far as I know, there's three magic spells in the game. On the keyboard (or joypad if you prefer) there's 'use magic', 'next magic' and 'previous magic' buttons. Surely having an independent magic button for each spell would have made more sense instead? It'd be like all the powers you get in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy or Quantum Break. (The only time in history anybody has ever suggested Psi-Ops or Quantum Break made more sense than something.)

I'm getting ahead of myself though. Jenna can't give me the last spell, since only Dragon Masters possess it.

Dragooooons!

What's next? I suppose I ought to mention the shop, seeing as I've been picking up bits of loose change all over the place. The only shop I've found so far is back in Bamboo Village (nothing stops commerce, it seems), where I can refill my health, mana and shield, or exchange money for experience points. I've been playing for a good few hours and if I spend all my money I can almost afford a third of a Level Up. I guess money just isn't a big part of this game. I haven't been getting paid from any of the friendly folks I've been helping - they're not so gauche to offer it and I think Fu wouldn't hear of it.

Right. Here we are in Quentin's floating tower. Or the tower that he claims is his, anyway. I'm giving the MEGA HAMMER a shot, but I'm yet to find its use. I'd rather have more uses of MIND BULLET than have a slow, useless, short-ranged, short-acting stun bomb.

The difficulty's gone right up in here. With all of Fu's quest lines all mixed up and available at any time, it's easy to blunder into a situation that you can't quite survive, or one for which you lack a necessary ability. And if you've saved half way through, that's your problem. There's three save slots, but they act as separate games - no backtracking by loading an old save.

With 2 HP left, can I make it to the top of this spike-lined vertical jumping challenge, latching onto each edge in turn? No, I can't. Poor Fu explodes off the screen and it's Game Over.

I reappear only a couple of screens down the tower. Not a great distance, but a whole lot of effort.

Getting hit by an enemy without the shield up flings you backwards helplessly, and successfully striking an enemy pushes you back as well! The only thing worse than being pushed down a hole between several platforms and having to retrace your steps through a bunch of enemies you've already defeated without the help of the now-missing in-level powerups is having to retrace your steps and re-fight those enemies because you hit them correctly.

Fu has very little in the way of offensive options for enemies not on his level. I can either swipe to the side or magic to the side. I've got to jump down there and whack a few digits off this Groucho bot and be very, very quick either using the shield or jumping the heck out of there. My sword attacks don't stun enemies so I have to move fast. I'm starting to regret playing on Normal.

Being hit while using the shield reduces the damage by a considerable amount and prevents you from being knocked back. Together with the Perk that increases your invulnerability timer, it seems like that could be one way to make safer - if awfully sketchy - progress.

Alright, here's Quentin's glowworm. Phew.

It emits a beam of light just like the fish from Donkey Kong Country 2, except without the epilepsy-inducing screen-flash that happens when you flip from left to right. Appreciated.

Mission complete!

Mission incomplete!

And so the panda and the pink bunny wizard sit down in front of the floating tower (which may or may not be his) and we reach the end of this chapter of...

Yes! No! No.

And so Fu wanders back across the world map to the Eternal Tree...

Stop. Just stop. Stop talking.

Just.

Just stop. I want to go to bed.

And so, at last, Fu is roped into doing another thing...

And I've arrived at the Sky Forest, which is where I get off.

I left Super Panda Adventures to one side for a while before writing this post, expecting to be irresistibly drawn back into the lovely, goofy world of Fu and friends, but somehow I'm just not feeling it. It isn't bad. There's absolutely nothing bad about the game whatsoever. I'm certain of that. But I'm hesitant to call it really very good.

There's no arguing that it knocks the pants off any Amiga game you care to mention. Running at a nice frame rate alone shows up ninety-nine percent of the early home computer games Super Panda Adventures sort-of resembles as the antiquated horrors they really are. And it's more approachable than almost every SNES or Mega Drive game thanks to its infinite continues and generous saving. But I feel like it would have to do a little more, give a little more for me to really enjoy it. When I'm exploring, I should feel like I'm going to new places, seeing new cool weird things, fighting bizarre foes and collecting amazing abilities. But instead I'm seeing confusing grids of repeated tiles, the same awful, annoying, difficult enemies again and again, stumbling into danger stupidly with my sword's tiny reach and gaining hardly any experience points for all of it.

This game is listed as 'Overwhelmingly Positive' on Steam, with 673 positive reviews to 24 negatives. I'd advise a little bit of caution in interpreting the phrase 'Overwhelmingly Positive': it means that the majority of people who left a review would say it's worth a little look, rather than everybody saying it's the best thing since chocolate-chip cookies. It's not.

Unlike Fu himself, who really is the best thing since chocolate-chip cookies.

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Thanks for dropping by and giving all those words some of your precious time. If you've got even more time to spare you could leave a comment, maybe even guess what the next game is going to be. Also mecha-neko can be found on Twitter as @mecha_neko.