Small Games #9!

 It's been three years since the last small games post, but I was recently playing random MSX games and discovered two platform games that were cute, fun, and interesting, but not really complex enough to carry posts of their own. The first is the oddly-titled Rise Out From Dungeon, and it's a little bit of a Lode Runner knock off, with gold bars, pursuing guards, and the ability to temporarily destroy the blocks that make up the platforms.

 

The way the guards move in particular is very similar to Lode Runner: they'll try to match your position horizontally before trying to match it vertically. They'll follow this pattern even if it means getting themselves trapped or falling to their deaths! It's the differences that really make it worthwhile, though. Firstly, your digging tool is very different to the one in Lode Runner. Rather than diffing a hole in one of the blocks next to the one on which you're standing, you instead have a gun that lets you shoot away blocks on the same height as you, even from across the screen. 

 

The other big difference is that you don't have to collect every gold bar before exiting the stage. Some stages have locked doors, and one of the bars will contain a key that you have to find before you can open the door, but otherwise, you can just rush to the exit if you aren't bothered about score. I really like the way this game looks, with your character represented by a little white stickman, and the enemies are red stickmen. It's all very tiny and cute, almost the bare minimum amount of pixels used to represent each object in the game.

 

The other game I'll talk about today is Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, in which you play as a lagomorph dockworker, trying to get crate to a ship while being chased and harassed by villainous white blobs. It's a platform game with stages that are only one screen wide, but they scroll vertically. You start at the top of each stage, and there's crates littered about (but not randomly!). When you walk past a crate, it drops down to the platform below. 

 

At the bottom of the stage, there's a cargo ship sailing back and forth, and you've got to get all of the crates onto it. Or at least, as many of them as you can. There's no penalty for just dropping crates into the ocean, but getting them on the ship is essential for getting a good score. There are also blocks that can be hit from below to reveal power ups, like in Mario, though it's slightly awkward in that they don't move, so you've got to descend, hit the block, then climb back up to get the item. It's usually worth it, though, as there's a common carrot item that temporarily makes you invincible, and a rarer yellow smiley face that just immediately ends the stage (good for progress, but very bad for scoring). Both these games are great, and I definitely recommend you give them a try, and it feels like a great bit of luck that I found them both consecutively.