Lin Zexu No Smoking (NES)

The odd title Lin Zexu No Smoking (also known as Lin Ze Xu Jin Yan) can be explained away by the fact that in this game, you play as Longyin Yan, an agent of the nineteenth century Chinese official Lin Zexu, and you spend the game trying to stop the opium trade in China, by fighting against the evil British and their treacherous allies. This all takes place in a beat em up, with some very light adventure game trimmings.

Those light trimmings seem to be an attempt at telling a TV serial-style story through an eight bit videogame, which is very ambitious, though unfortunately, the game doesn't really live up to that ambition. Basically, at the start of each stage, you're given an order, like, go and investigate the British Museum. But you can't go straight there, you have to ask around to find out who might know the way, then find them and ask them for directions. This wouldn't be too bad, were it not for the invisible walls that actually stop you going anywhere until someone's told you the way to get there. And this happens for pretty much every location you need to get to on foot. A particularly egregious case is when you're looking for a secret passage in a garden. The secret passage is hidden in a well, but you can't go down it until you've spoken to the woman nearby who lies and tells you that there's no secret passages nearby.

As for the beat em up sections, they're not totally horrible. Even though there's rarely more than two enemies on screen at a time, they still manage to be challenging, and you do have a few moves at your disposal, though honestly, the only really useful one is your flying kick. Once you get to the jungle and enemies start shooting projectiles at you, the difficulty drastically shoots upwards, too. In fact, there's apparently a part later in the game where you take to the high seas and fire cannons at British ships, but after over half an hour trying to get past one particular gun-toting enemy on the beach, I had give up for the sake of my sanity.

Despite its various huge flaws, I can't bring myself to be too harsh on Lin Zexu No Smoking, as like I said, it is a very ambitious game, both for the hardware, and for the time it was released (in 1996, even on the Playstation and Saturn this kind of story-heavy action game wasn't that common). It's not a good game, but it is at least worthy of note. And one last thing: if you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend doing so on an emulator with the NES's sprite limit turned off. Otherwise the game is a flickery mess. Not to the point of unplability, but it is very ugly and dampens the experience.

The Lost Golem (Dreamcast)

Remember Pushover on the Amiga? It was a puzzle game about an ant pushing over dominos. The Lost Golem reminds me of that game, only it's top-down, rather than side-on. You play as a golem, who iis charged with looking after a king. The king, like most royals, is some kind of blinkered lemming-esque idiot who constantly walks foward until he hits an obstacle, at which point he turns ninety degrees and carries on. Unless the obstalcle is a bottomless pit, then he walks into it and falls to his doom.

So, what you have to do is go ahead of the king, pushing walls around using you immense golemic strength, to make sure that the king's walk takes him to the next door. There are, of course, some further complications. The first is that the king has to walk directly towards the door, as if he approaches it from the side, he'll go straight past it (he's a blinkered idiot, remember?). The second, for which I have no explanation, is that a certain number of the walls in the stage have to be connected by pillars when the kind goes through the door. Pillars will crumble away when there's no walls touching them, and there are two kinds of pillar (in the stages I could reach, anyway): ones that cause attached walls to rotate ninety degrees when pushed, and ones that just let their attached walls go forward one space when pushed.

So, like most puzzle games of this type, those are the elements that make up the stages, and the rules that make up the puzzles, and the game itself is just a long series of those puzzles. Also like most puzzle games of this type, I'm terrible at it. Unfortunately, the stages in the main mode have to tackled in a linear fashion, and I managed to get to the thirteenth of them, which I made many attempts at before giving up. But, as far as I can tell, this is a decent enough example of these kinds of games. There's some stages where you try every convoluted solution you can think of before it hits you that you literally only need to make one move to solve it. That seems like a good thing to me.

There's a couple of other diversions besides the main story, too! There's a simple stage editor that lets you set up a stage in a 3x3 grid, and I guess if you've got the patience for this kind of game, you probably also have the patience to make stages for it, too. I know for a short time back in the ancient past, I was playing a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, and enjoyed that game's stage editor, and it's the same principle, isn't it? Finally, there's a two player versus mode, with a king, two golems, and two doors. You move walls around to annoy your opponent and also guide the king to your door. There's no AI opponent, though, and even if you had someone around, I can't imagine wanting to play this over any of the Dreamcast's many excellent fighting games.

The Lost Golem is of a genre that's a little outside of my wheelhouse, but I think I enjoyed it enough to say that if you like puzzle games where you move stuff around and there's a specific solution to every stage, then this is a decent one of those.