Presented in Retrovision: La-Mulana
The Internet is a great place to find homebrew software. The ability to access vast amounts of information, much of which is created by regular people, has made it somewhat of a haven for the independent game developer. That being said, many great free titles have sprouted up. I am going to get in trouble for wanting to talk about this game, as it only retro by design. This week I am talking about GR3 Project's La-Mulana.
La-Mulana, as I stated, is not "retro" in the purest sense of the word. In 2005, a group of Japanese developers teamed up to make a game. Named the GR3 project, they had grown tired of the lack of challenge in modern games. Consequences generally consisted of testing, accepting a consequence and restoring a save game and trying again. This basic concept can apply to almost any game made within the last few years thanks to the "save anywhere" attitude of most software. These developers wanted to return to games designed in the 1980s, where careless game play was quickly met with death and more than a few minutes of wasted time. La-Mulana acts a tribute to the games of yore and, more specifically, Konami and their early MSX titles.
The most striking thing is how authentic La-Mulana looks. The entire game was designed to appear as if it was created for the MSX. It features a 15 color palette, with only 2 colors per eight pixels, one exception being a few on screen sprites. While the graphics lack color depth, they make up for it in sheer detail and careful design. Even the scrolling is done in the same jerking, jarring manner of aging hardware.
The game soundtrack is equally authentic. Sound effects and music (excluding a few digitized loading sounds) are genuine FM ditties. The MSX was limited in it's ability to produce high quality audio samples, limited to generating sounds on the fly using a limited amount of data. This limitation resulted in things that had a unique "computerized" feel. GR3 Project did not ignore this. The entire soundtrack consists of beeps, boops and noise in various combinations, which really makes you feel like you are playing a game from the 80's.
La-Mulana is almost an authentic Konami title in it's level of parody. Just about every title from the company in the 80s and 90s seem to be referenced at some point. The game play is based heavily around the action title Maze of Galious, a platformer. Players control Lemeza Kosugi, a archaeologist and professor through the labyrinthine maze of La-Mulana. Throughout his quest, he must locate various items to solve genius-level puzzles and defeat massive bosses. The parody is further expanded with the addition of a handheld MSX. Scattered throughout the game are various cartridges and disks for the handheld that add new functions like the ability to save, read encoded glyphs and even play additional mini-games, to include a Snatcher/dating-sim parody and a full fledged Gradius clone.
The difficulty level rests somewhere around the point of pure masochism. Savings games is extremely limited. Only one save point exists in the entire game world, which is located at the first screen. This requires players to navigate through large portions of the game multiple times, which adds a certain sense of dread of death, and is something that has been systematically removed from most modern games. Along with the long walks are puzzles that require foresight. Simply jumping blindly off of a cliff may result in players dying or being trapped in a dead end with no means of survival other than to teleport back to the beginning of the game. Normal monsters do little damage, but with a lack of restorative items, small amounts of damage quickly snowballing. Curiosity is met with relentless punishment. Switches may result in spikes appearing underfoot and pedestals cause the ceiling to collapse, keeping players on their toes rather than simply letting them hack and slash their way mindlessly through a dungeon.
Even with it's abusive nature, La-Mulana is fun. The soundtrack rocks, the graphics are deliciously dated, and the game hurts you oh so good. Never before have I been so eager to be stumped and felt so accomplished by making it through the first level of a game in my life. It has the right balance of difficulty and humor, and the entire game feels professional, even if it was designed a few decades late. It is free and it has been translated to English. Frankly, if you have access to a PC, then there is no reason to not try it at least once.
Game Translation and Download (Aeon Genesis)
Asterick
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 18 April 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: fan translation, gr3 project, homebrew, konami, la-mulana, presented in retrovision, retro like
I'm so pleasantly surprised to see you do a piece on this game! This is one of the best games I have ever played. Anyone who demands originality and true greatness and who wants a significant (but fair!) challenge in their games will appreciate this. Just thinking about it makes me want to go back and play it again.
And if you want a significant but entirely unfair challenge that hates you and wants you - the player, not the character - to die, there's always the Hell Temple. Thankfully, most people who play the game will never know that it exists.
It's a wonderful game though.