Kid Chameleon Review

       I just realized it's going to be hard for me to give a proper score to Kid Chameleon. Back when it was made in '92, there were many such games that you had to play over and over again until you finally beat that last level, no saving involved. Not many games had over 100 super-hard levels like Kid Chameleon though. It's really hardcore.

       Kid Chameleon is a 2d platformer for the Sega Genesis. I played it on PS3 on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. And I save-scummed like it was my job to beat the game. This game is extremely hard and has a seemingly unending torrent of levels. Even thinking of trying to beat it legitimately is nonsense. I understand that there are some warp-points like in Mario 3 that can let you jump forward many levels. Good luck discovering them though. Beating this game outright would take...probably years. In fact I was just reading an article by a guy who has the world's high score in the game, and if I was reading it right, it took him six years to initially beat the game. A few years ago I got into the game and played it a lot. I was trying to play it without saving, and I got to about level 10 or so. This time around, I just wanted to beat it and have some fun, and thankfully on SUGC, you can save at any time. So typically I would save at the beginning of each level and reload as needed, although several times, especially in the later levels where I was tempted to rage quit, I would even save mid-level.

       So, in Kid Chameleon, there is a virtual reality arcade game, kind of like a holodeck. It's final boss has started kidnapping kids (in real life). The player goes into the machine to save them. So each level is a level in the game within a game. That's so meta. You run around in these levels, which are often pretty big and feature multiple paths to multiple exits. You can jump on enemies heads to kill them. You often find power-ups that transform you into a new form, such as a samurai with a sword, a knight with lots of hit points, a tank that shoots skulls (?), or a axe-throwing Jason look alike. That's about half of the transformations, I won't ruin them all. Some of the later ones are amazing...

       X is jump, the d-pad controls your movement, and holding square makes you run. Circle activates your current form's special power. To use our previous examples, the samurai swings his sword, the knight can climb walls, the tank shoots, and the Jason guy throws axes. Some forms also have alternate moves or abilities. For example, the Samurai can stab downward if you press circle and down when in the air, the vanilla, un-transformed kid can grab onto blocks and flip himself up if you double-tap X, and the knight has more hit points and breaks any blocks he lands on with his feet.

       Speaking of blocks, they are everywhere. Blocks with a “p” on them contain power-ups and crystals and extra lives and such. You can also find clocks that increase the time you have to complete the level, as every level has a countdown timer in the corner, and if it reaches zero, you die. I found myself transforming a lot, as there are plentiful power ups and transforming re-fills your hit points. The crystals you find are used to activate special powers that each form has. You do this by holding square and pressing start. Typically these powers make crystals fly out and attack the enemy in a different pattern depending on what form you are in. There is usually a 20 crystal power and a 50 crystal power that is more potent, although one or two of the forms mess with this pattern. These abilities are quite powerful and can be a big help getting through tough spots, but unless you are really going after each and every crystal in a level, you'll only be using these powers once every 5 levels or so.

       The game has a bit of a Mario feel to it at first, but soon you realize that the levels have a much bigger verticality to them than classic Mario. You go up and down almost as much as you go left or right. That combined with the constant transforming really makes the game feel like it's own beast once you get a few levels in, and once you get really deep into the game, it feels nothing at all like Mario despite the fact that you jump on enemies' heads and punch blocks to make power-ups come out.

       Kid Chameleon has pretty great art and music. Each of the many forms have great sprites and animation, and the many enemy types are great as well. I especially love the humanoid killer whales that melt into skeletons when they die. The levels tend to have a blocky look to them, but when you beat the level, the holograms fade to reveal that you are still in the arcade machine, which is a very cool effect. The music is a bit less aggressive and in your face than most games in the genre from this time. It's less about melodies. Kid Chameleon's music fades more into the background. It's nice to have a different musical style in a platformer, which is a genre defined by its many tropes. The sound effects fit in well with the mix too. I especially love the enemies that yell “Die!” at you. That's amazing. If you enjoy seeing crazy stuff from the '90's, you'll love what you see and hear in this title.

       Kid Chameleon is a lot of fun, but it has two major flaws. First, it's really hard to control. You might not notice too much at first, but once the jumps start getting tricky, you will realize that the controls are insanely floaty. The kid controls like a blimp or something. When you jump, you can change direction in the air and your movement to such a degree that it makes it hard to land where you want to, even if you've been playing for hours. When you start getting into harder areas, this leads to frustration. Second, the game is insanely hard! Ok, first off, there's no saving because this is an old school game. I get that. But many, many of the game's levels require trial and error to figure out what to do. The areas that almost require you to sacrifice lives to figure out what to do outnumber the amount of lives you get probably four to one. Which means the designers want you to replay 20...30... 70... 80+ levels just to get back to the level you are on so you can blow through your remaining lives trying to figure out what to do. I would venture to say you would need to repeat that process hundreds of times to beat the game. If a designer asks you to do something repetitive, it must be compelling. Kid Chameleon is fun, but it is nowhere near compelling enough to merit that kind of intense play. In my opinion, that is bad game design (unless of course this was purely a hardware issue, i.e. there was no way to make the game save, in which case I apologize for the nasty stuff I'm about to say). I get that this game is famously super-hard, but what people have to realize is that (in this case) this means is your game isn't fun. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is a good counterpoint to Kid Chameleon. It is probably the harder game in terms of the pure challenge the levels throw at you. But because it has saving between levels, it is engaging and fun to throw yourself at its challenges over and over until you finally break through and beat a level. It is designed to be extremely hard, yet fun and beatable. Kid Chameleon is just way too hardcore for me. I really enjoyed playing it and seeing it all through save-scumming though.

       Kid Chameleon is not beyond hard. Like I said, Giana Sisters is probably harder. Kid Chameleon is beyond punishing though, and requires a life-time commitment to beat legitimately. What that means for 99% of the people who play it is that they will have a few days of fun with it and then give it up having not seen 70% of its fun levels. Whether you are a kid in 1996 or a modern-day person trying to beat an old school platformer without saving, that doesn't help you, it just frustrates you. You can have some fun times playing as far as you can get legitimately, or you can have fun seeing all the levels using save-scumming, but beating the game outright is one of gaming's toughest challenges, and one few will ever accomplish. And that's due not only to the insanely punishing nature of the game, but also to its impossibly floaty physics. The two or so people who do complete the game legitimately will probably feel more pain than pleasure. Kid Chameleon is a Mediocre Game, Tier 2.

Fatal Labyrinth Review

      I was excited to hear that there was a rogue-like on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (although I think this game was only on Mega Drive. I'm playing a few of the games on the collection now, and I just beat Fatal Labyrinth.

       The only other rogue-like I've played for any length of time is Shiren the Wanderer, which is an incredible game. I would probably give it a perfect score were I to review it on this site. Fatal Labyrinth certainly follows many of the rogue-like tropes I'm familiar with from Shiren. The game is a turn-based dungeon crawler that takes place on a grid. Unlike Shiren, you can't move diagonally. If you've never played a game like this, the turn-based system is pretty cool. You move or take an action as if you are playing a real-time game, but after your action, every enemy on the screen takes an action too, and then it is your turn again. This all happens so fast that if you are just walking around, it looks and feels like a real-time game. You are faster than most enemies in the game, so you usually get to move a few times for each of their moves, although in combat they attack just as fast as you.

       On the PS3 port of this game, you move with the direction buttons, pick up items with square, and open the menu with X. You close the menu with circle. Square also causes you to skip a turn, which is extremely useful to help yourself get into position during fights. This game uses the “bump to attack” system that many rogue-likes use; in order to attack an enemy, you just press the direction button toward the enemy when you are standing by one.

       So you walk around the dungeon levels looking for the staircase that will take you up to the next level. Your goal is to get to the top of the castle and retrieve a mystical goblet or something. Along the way, you'll find tons of gear and loot. You can find and equip weapons and armor, and find potions, one-time-use magic staves, and one-time-use magic scrolls. Almost everything you find starts out unidentified. For example, you might find a potion called “pink potion,” and you won't know what it does until you drink it. There are a few items that hurt you, so it can be an adventure trying different items out. Once you use something once, if you find another like one, the description will be filled in since you know what it does. There are staffs that shoot magic at enemies, scrolls that confuse enemies, and a ton of other effects (almost all of which I was familiar with from playing Shiren).

       You'll also encounter a bunch of different enemy types, such as slow-moving and weak slimes, ninjas that throw suriken at you from far away, wizards that put various curses on you, and snails that hold you in place so you can't retreat. Again, almost every type of enemy is straight out of Shiren (and, I guess, straight out of Rogue or other rogue-likes). The have really cool sprites for the most part. The art in general is pretty cool. Different weapons and armor even appear on your character when you equip them.

       There are 30 randomly generated levels to get through, and unlike a traditional rogue-like, if you die, you can continue from every 5^th level. Usually rogue-likes have straight-up permadeath. Permadeath is a staple of rogue-likes, so it's a bit weird that it's absent here. But I must admit I loved being able to continue the few times I died on my run through. That's mostly because the game isn't really engaging enough to be playing it over and over from the beginning, but more on that later.

       For a rogue-like, Fatal Labyrinth is very easy. I think I only died 2-3 times, and I didn't have that many life-threatening situations come up. Most rogue-likes are pretty darn hard. This one is certainly beatable, even if it did have permadeath, which it doesn't.

       There are a few big cons to this game. The music is good, but it is on a loop, and that loop is about 15 seconds long, so it gets old fast, and it only changes every 10 floors or so. The game is also really clunky. Going into the menu is a pain as whenever you exit the menu, you exit all the way out. Since you often have more than one thing you need to do in the menu, this means you are frustrated and inconvenienced almost constantly. For example, if you find a ring, you have to go into the menu to equip it, and then go into the menu again to look at it's description to see what it does. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but you'll be in and out of the menu constantly, so the time wasted really adds up. The menu also has all your items split up into different categories, meaning you have to scroll through different icons just to look at your stuff. Shiren just had all your items in one sortable inventory, which works infinetely better than Labyrinth's system. There is also no way to turn in place, so in order to change direction, you must take a step in the direction you want to go. This really hampers your tactics and makes long-range weapons almost useless. By the time you take a step toward an enemy so that you are pointed at them, they have taken a step toward you too, and the rooms are so small you are probably now standing next to each other. Because melee weapons are more powerful, that means you should just use your melee weapon at that point.

       I would say that Fatal Labyrinth is a good beginner rogue-like because it is so easily beatable and it doesn't really have permadeath, but the truth is it's so clunky that it would probably frustrate people unfamiliar with the genre. Beginners would be much better off playing something with an infinetely better interface, like Shiren. Veterans should also look elsewhere, as there isn't much to the game beyond very basic rogue-like tropes and a terrible interface. That means that the game is really for no one. It was ok to quickly blast through it though. That's why it's a mediocre game, tier 3.