Beeping Tom: Action Puzzle Prism Land (2000)

Because sometimes in life, you just gotta destroy the sun before the half-naked foxlady blinds you with her vanity mirror.

Beeping Tom is a new Little Bo Beep column that spies with its little eye those games which fell through the cracks of time.

The Skills to Win

In 1987 I spent a lot of time in DOS editing config.sys and its hetero lifepartner autoexec.bat trying to get Arkanoid to work with a Logitech trackball. But no go.  There wasn’t enough memory in the CompuAdd 286/12 to run both at the same time, just like there isn’t enough nerd cred in the world to justly reward this paragraph.

This meant that I had to play the classic Pong-esque bat-and-ball game with the arrow keys, which simply moved the paddle slowly left and right at a steady, casual speed.  Not good.  In a game like Arkanoid, where success is contingent upon your ability to fly all the way across the screen in a flash to catch up to a frenzied ball, this was like trying to carve an intricate dolphin figurine out of granite, using a giant jackhammer.  But this was 1987, and back then, if you couldn’t have the game you loved, you loved the game you had.  And I had Arkanoid, on a 3-color CGA monitor, with the arrow keys.

Weeks became months, over which time  I learned to play Arkanoid with the proverbial hand tied behind my back.  I gradually trained myself to instinctively predict where the ball would end up once it arrived at the bottom.  I just had to be 3 or 4 steps ahead of the game, reading out the caroms, slowly positioning myself in the spot where the ball would be, prepared to field the volley.  By the end of it, I could beat the game about 50% of the time — 33 boards with a keyboard on a game that had no continues, making me the Jimmy Woods of Arkanoid.  Waste of time?  Hardly.  Whereas most of today’s games force you to level up your character in order for him to beat the last guy, I had to actually level myself up in the real world, learning an actual physical skill in order to win. And skills are what you need if you want to succeed at life.

Now, Arkanoid was a bit of a flawed game. Every now and then, the ball would have some kind of LSD flashback and just dart off in a random direction you had no hope of predicting, oftentimes straight the hell down. You only had two extra guys in this game, so if you lost one unfairly because the ball was a little stoned, you just started the game over.  It couldn’t be helped. The angle physics in general weren’t 100% what they needed to be; sometimes the ball would get stuck in a weird corner, trapped in a repeating loop from which it was unable to extricate itself. This was hilarious the first few times it happened, like a basketball getting caught between the rim and backboard.  But it quickly became a tired pain in the ass that prematurely ended games, like a basketball getting caught between yes and so forth.

One time Arkanoid got stuck,  I decided to experiment and left the game running before leaving the house for a sleepover at my friend’s place.  The next day, I returned to find that my dad had turned the computer off shortly after I had left, and he chided me gently for wasting electricity. He was right to do so.

Japanese 7-11′s

Anyway, there have been many, many Arkanoid clones since 1987, and the bat-and-ball game which began with Pong and Breakout soon fleshed out into a legitimate genre of its own. The physics issues were ironed out, and the gameplay was made more complex.  Action Puzzle Prism Land (PlayStation, 2000) is a highly entertaining, low-budget and late-model entry into the field, with all kinds of power-ups — cumulative, mind you — and 100 boards spread over 10 distinct worlds.  The game actually supports a mouse, but — say it with me now – I used da damn keybawd. Finally, another chance to exercise my Arkanoid skill outside of corporate America!

The story is simple and completely irrelevant: Prim (Player 1) — an anthropomorphic cat Pokémon in cutoffs — travels with Princess Rhythm (Player 2) to the land of [I do not know what the land is called and I cannot imagine that it possibly matters].  There they find that the prisms which keep the land and its creatures healthy and thriving have been imprisoned in crystals by 10 truly queer meanies and their evil boss.  Prisms … encased in crystals.  Your job is to travel the 10 different realms, free all the biome-specific creatures from their crystal prisons by cracking them with a ball, and finally kill the meanies and free the prisms.  I truly cannot tell you how embarrassed I am to have typed all that out.

The game is colorful, the sounds are appealing, and the screen is busy — the perfect way to keep two screaming toddlers occupied, and since the game was usually in the bargain bin of Japanese 7-11′s, an affordable solution as well.

As you clear boards, you accumulate magic points which you can then spend on power ups between levels.  The game lets you see what each level looks like so that you can decide which powers you want to buy.  However, Action Puzzle Prism Land has infinite continues, letting you pick up exactly where you left off without even restarting the board, so there is no real impetus to buy power ups except to amuse yourself.  In fact, there’s no real point to you having lives either — the sign of a thoroughly well-thought-out game.

The game addresses all of the issues which plagued Arkanoid.  One of the most frustrating aspects of the prior game was how difficult it was to hit the final remaining block left on a board — it was often infuriating trying to orient the ball perfectly enough to hit a specific spot where the one remaining block was situated.  Arkanoid “dealt” with the issue by speeding the ball up faster and faster until it basically forced you to clear the block by accident or die.  Real player-friendly, that.  By contrast, Prism Land has a couple of features that solve this problem more elegantly: first off, if you go too long without clearing any blocks away, the game drops down a bomb-style power up, which you can use to detonate the ball, clearing everything in its vicinity.   A niftier power-up is demonstrated below; it basically allows you to control the ball after it leaves your paddle, letting you guide it into tricksy crevices that would have taken Arkanoid’s clumsy ball ages to finger satisfactorily.

Notice the block on the bottom that needs clearing … reverse Arkanoid!  Man walked on the moon, and now this.

There are several of the “crowd-pleasing” types of powerups, rare goodies which are satisfying to use on a very basic emotional level, such as the spicy meatball below, which crashes through everything, even distorting the screen edges.  And yes, this monster can still slip past your paddle and you’ll lose a life. I know because I managed one time to let it do just that, and punished myself for my comical negligence by disallowing corn for 3 days (note: I enacted no such punishment).

These kinds of power-ups — laser beams, ultra-destructive falling stars — allow you to clear a board in just a few seconds.  Sometimes this is a bit of a blessing, as the game designers got rather lazy over the last, oh, 30 or so boards, so one develops a very great desire to plough through these monotonous levels as quickly as possible to simply get the game over with — it’s a pretty long game to begin with for the type of game it is (a good 3-5 hours straight through, less if you really have things planned out).  Whether they ran out of money or effort or simply came up against a deadline, who can say … it is very much like the last few boards of Super Paper Mario for the Wii.  A blatant rush job.

Asymmetrical, Swampcoon Style

Where Prism Land really begins to distinguish itself is the boss fights.  None of them are particularly difficult — in fact, the first boss fight, with the snow queen below, is clearly hardest for some reason — but things do tend to get a bit … memorable.  This icy lady is probably just a bit risqué but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for young boys who were dreamily confused about Cheetara for many years.

This electro-cloudclops is a little fierce, what with his relentless lightning strikitude, but he’s basically a pushover.  You’ll notice that the music doesn’t exactly fill you with dread.

And again the skies are clear for various birds to fly free, as Kid Icarus celebrates the exorcism of the foul vaporclops.

But here is where things definitely skewed oddways.  This wolfy boss is holding the forest prism hostage, and as I wage war against him, his defense is to carve an intricate dolphin figure out of granite, using a giant jackhammer.  He is sculpting at me.  And if I crack his plinth with my ball, he stoically trashes his work and begins anew.  Dude is filled with secrets. In all honesty, I have not yet figured out whether I need to allow him to finish his masterpiece before attacking him, or whether destroying his efforts is the key to his discouragement here, but as long as you just keep the ball alive, the fight tends to end for one reason or another.

As you can see, Prim and the Princess look on as a furious harpy unencumbered by nippledom claws and scrapes at the wolf-artiste, vest, cravate and all, as a wild boar and roid-rage Bambi ignore his cries for mercy.  But the prism atop the mountain eyrie is thankfully unencrystalled, and that is all that matters, I suppose.  Perhaps his crimes were just that great, and his art just that unwanted.

Then there’s this hag.

I am not quite sure what manner of comment is appropriate here.  If you watched what I watched, then you saw what I saw, as well as what was seen by thousands of children across various continents as they sought to slay the swamp-aggressor.  It is quite possible that any untoward interpretation of the goings-on would be to impute more than is called for, and upon that presumption I’ll let the matter be.

But it sure as fuck looks like this big-tittied swampbitch is totally masturbating off her fleshy, unmistakably penile appendage, causing it to emit bubbles all over the place.  That seems like a terrible disease!  And judging by her expression, she is ULTRA DETERMINED about this yankoff, concentrating deeply on executing her intriguing, unorthodox method.

After this filthy, filthy creature is defeated, the waters once again run clean, allowing a vast menagerie of Pokémen and furries — yes, we are going ahead and calling them furries by this point — to bathe in peace and contentment, clothing optional, just as the Land of Prisms had been prior to the arrival of the masturbating raccoon, the dolphin-sculpting hammerwolf, and the frenzied cottony Zeus-clops.

It isn’t all quite so dubious — there is a relatively mundane whale boss, an amusing robot made of kitchen utensils, and a perplexing, lazily-coded final guy at the end.   On the balance of things, it’s for you alone to indict or withhold.  But I have to say this desert-level boss fight at the end of world 5 convinced me of a few things, whatever said things may be:

I do not know what that looked like on your monitor, but on mine, that mirror-flashing absolutely blinded me.  Not in the “ho ho, I am unable to see my ball through this uniform white hue, what a jolly effective impediment”, but more like “OW what the-… what WHAT?  Holy what the, that HURT … are you KIDDING ME?  Ow!   OWWWW!”

This boss fight is not all that difficult otherwise, but it takes forever, mostly because of the way her right leg keeps kicking your ball away like a Monty Python cutout.  You need to sneak the ball by her legs just so if you are to have any chance at destroying the sun which is causing the ground beneath you to consume itself.

And if you were wondering, yes, after she is defeated, her clothes come undone, but it is visible for only a few frames, and back in 2000, PlayStations didn’t have a screencapture function.  But a lot changes in 10 years.