Sunday 20 January 2019

Pastel Island (Arcade)

Pastel Island is an unreleased arcade prototype, though as far as I can tell, the only noticable bug it has is that the "INSERT COINS" text keeps flashing while you're playing, so it doesn't seem totally unfair to treat it as if its a finished game. And it's not like it's on sale anywhere or anything, so I'm hardly going to be tricking anyone into buying a stinker or anything. Anyway, it's a maze game from 1993 where, by the time-honoured tradition, you are tasked with collecting all the points items (this time they're hearts) in a stage, before going to the next stage and doing it there, and so on.

It's a pretty full-featured game, too. There's a couple of scoring systems in play, the main one revolving around collecting stars. Stars are one of a few random power-ups that can appear when you destroy one of the destructible items littered around each stage, and when you kill an enemy. As a side note, while the power-ups are random, you can shoot them to turn them into other power ups, so scoring isn't totally reliant on the kindness of the random number generator, which is nice. The stars, when collected, multiply the value of the hearts for a limited time. If you collect a star while one's already active, the multiplier increases by one. So, collecting stars, and doing it in quick succession, is obviously an important part of the scoring system.

The other main scoring element is the selection of end-of-stage bonuses available. There's a bonus for how many stars you collected, as well as no-jump, no-dash, and no-miss bonuses. It's possible there might be a no-shoot bonus, too, but I haven't been able to finish a stage without shooting, so I don't know. The power ups other than the stars are S and P icons, whose purpose I haven't quite figured out, but I think that one of them will allow you to take one extra hit before dying, and a bubble, which turns your shots into lethal bubbles, rather than the stunning popcorn-like bullets you usually put out.

I should also mention the graphics, since this is a pretty good-looking game. The enemy and player sprites are an exception, all being quite ugly, but in their favour, every enemy has different behaviour and different abilities, and they're all easy to tell apart, which is nice. The stages are what really looks good, though: I'm not sure if they're made of a very low number of texture-mapped polygons, or if each stage is a huge Mode 7-style rotated sprite, but whatever it is, it's an effective and appealing effect. The stages also change name and visual theme every other one, and I was amused by stages 3 and 4 being called the "Confort [sic] Zone".

Pastel Island is a great-looking game that's fun to play, and while it's no Raimais, it would have been a worthy addition to the genre had it been officially released. Having said that, it's fairly obvious why it wasn't: in 1993, the first 2D fighting game boom was in full swing, and 3D fighting and racing games were just starting to loom over the horizon too. A maze game, no matter how well-designed, would have looked embarassingly old hat in that environment. Still, I recommend giving Pastel Island a chance if you're a fan of score-chasing.

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