His credentials are somewhat hard to trace. He has his name on some games since early Famicom days and his last game I managed to find was the 1997 Running High. All his work that I know of seems to have been developed under System Sacom. His titles range from Pinball games, to sports racing games, and then today's offering.
Fire Rock (no relation to the recently covered Fire Bam) is a stone age-looking platform game, released during a time when games with prehistoric settings were quite popular. The PC Engine had four, the Bonk series plus the Legendary Axe, Joe and Mac appeared on many different consoles, there was the unlicensed adventures of Big Nose on the NES in america, then there was Prehistoric etc. You even had a stone age era taxi game, Ugh for DOS. What sets Fire Rock apart from all of these are the abominable controls.
Unlike the other games mentioned above, in Fire Rock you seem to be controling a caveman with springs for shoes who just took a swim in a pool full of lubricant. Your jump is far too short to reach most platforms and items, and so you'll be left with climbing on walls. Remembering how easy it was in Bonk, imagine the same basic method of continualy pressing the jump button while holding up, except increase the amount of button presses needed to clear the same basic obstacle by about 800 %. Basicly you don't climb, you sort of....inch your way upwards very very very slowly. And in case you happen to fall off, you not only fall down, but slide backwards, most likely into lava, which makes you jump forward and idealy fall back down below a platform you just spent a good five minutes getting up on. You have no control of where you're character will be after you try executing a jump, because more often then not it will simply backfire and kill you.
Now imagine this control scheme applied to a game where you need to jump all the time, and I do mean all the time, plus where precise movements to make it into perilously placed doorways hanging in midair over pools of lava-filled death is the norm.
Your goal throughout the game is to go through each maze like level and the many doors that spontaneously appear in a room depending on from which door you got in, find each boss (the room is a different colour then the norm so it's easy to tell what flock of enemies is just that and which one counts as a "boss"), kill it, then find the necessary items and then find the one door which may look slightly different from the others and leave the level. Along the way you collect torches to increase your fire power (which is agravatingly reset whenever you start a new level), vases for points and hearts to generate a shield that you will immediately lose upon being hit once so why bother and besides you have no after hit invincibility and the boss ramming you into a corner can literaly drain all your life before you come out of your post-hit dammage animation. There isn't realy anything more to say, other then the keys are usualy put in the most ridiculous of places, such as below, the key one finds on the first level.
 |
| Yeah, that's an easy start. |
Now once again, try and imagine this setup, only one of the later levels is designed around one way secret walkways hidden in walls, ceilings and floors where one incorrect movement sends you plummeting to the very bottom of the maze.
The basic design of the game is not bad, the levels look different enough to not seem repetitive, the enemies and bosses look fun and it seems like it could very well be a much, much better game only if Mark Flint didn't bend over backwards just to infuse it with "realism" thereby making it nigh-unplayable.
No comments:
Post a Comment