Jeremy Parish
patreon
Metroidvania Works #16: Battle of Olympus / Guardian Legend / Exile
🕑 Added 2023-06-14 07:43:02 +0000 UTCMetroidvania Works continues apace. This week, a rare triple-trouble entry. It admittedly would have been more fun to have paired up the third game in this set—Exile for British microcomputers—with its upcoming counterpart—Exile/XZR for Japanese microcomputers—but alas, it was not to be. No matter, because the real innovation here happens on NES with the excellent The Battle of Olympus and the even more excellent The Guardian Legend, both localized by Brøderbund. It's a shame Brøderbund more or less stopped publishing for NES at this point, ’cause they had some great taste in localization.
By the way, some good news about SG-1000 Works is hidden in the YouTube note for this episode.
Comments
Ewen Roberts
I never expected to see Exile in such august company, it was an amazing game and truly was a miracle of programming that it could run on an unmodified Electron in colour. The mush you see around the play area is how much of the limited screen buffer memory they had to fill with data to fit that game into the tiny amount of available memory. The Electron has no hardware sprites and a more limited graphics system than the BBC micro so it’s definitely fair to say it was more constrained than an NES - especially if you take into account the later cartridge capabilities.
PT
Respecting of opinions and such, but folks liking Battle of Olympus over Zelda II is nuts to me. The lack of an overworld, as jank as that was in Zelda II, made it very difficult to navigate between areas. We have to go to the bland random door from this screen that looks like several others we just passed by, oops, you missed it. I also thought the combat was more jank. Some of the video footage you shot featured a lot of unfair hits because monsters would just lean at you. And the olive grind was a tad much. There are patches to fix some of the game's more nonsense grinding if anyone wants to revisit it.
