Soukoban is hell, except when it's HAL: The Adventures of Lolo | NES Works 120
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
- HAL Labs has been a regular fixture of NES Works nearly from the beginning thanks to their valuable behind-the-scenes contributions to games like Pinball, Golf, and Balloon Fight. And we saw a few self-published HAL titles back in 1988, though those amounted to simple ports of golden age arcade machines. Here, with Adventures of Lolo, we finally have a proper top-to-bottom self-published HAL original... and it's pretty great. You could be unkind and reduce Adventures of Lolo down to "Soukoban, but...," though that misses out on the fact that the "but..." is what sets this game apart. With real-time action and 50 stages of devastatingly crafted box-pushing puzzles beset by a variety of monsters cleverly designed and placed to both hinder and help protagonist Lolo (but mostly hinder), this is the first glimpse we've had of the fact that HAL could design good games rather than simply help others program them.
Production notes:
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its TH-cam debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more!
Why watch when you can read? Check out the massive hardcover print editions of NES Works, Super NES Works, and Virtual Boy works, available now at Limited Run Games (limitedrungame...! SG-1000 Works: Segaiden Vol. I is available NOW, and Metroidvania: The First Decade is due in 2024.
NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister. "Before the Storm" courtesy of Jacob Le.
My heart swells at the sight of Lolo. My Dad would rent this game and play it with us. We would save our passwords and rent it again to try again where we left off.
I love that.
@@MaidenHell1977 it’s one of the ways I remember him today. Special guy.
That's really sweet!
This resonates with me in a big way. When I was a kid, my cousin and I would play games and my aunt would either sit and watch or play with us. Great memories; and during a time where society told us video games were a waste of time and would rot our brains, it was nice to have an adult encourage us.
As a result, games like Final Fantasy got me into reading books, and that opened many doors down the road.
Me and my sister used to rent it all the time. Still love it to this day.
A friend and I stayed up all night playing through this game once, and this was in the mid 2000s when we were both in our early 20s. There are puzzles in the game where (spoilers) you need to use an object to obstruct two enemies at once, instead of the standard one. When I realized this, I couldn't quite figure out how to put it into words and ended up exclaiming to my friend (who was playing at the time) "You need to do, like, two at once! Blocking!!" and he just LOST HIS MIND laughing. "Two at once blocking" is STILL a frequent joke between us some 15+ years later lol
"Half-tile BS" as they say on Lolo de Puzlo's streams.
This game was one of my mothers favorite games on Nintendo entertainment system. She’s in her 60s now and she still swoons about her love when I bring up Lolo.
That's awesome ^^
Nintendo Power did give Lolo 3 a multi-page spread that covered solutions to several of the puzzles though, but yeah they kind of did them dirty by barely acknowledging the first two games. I still play Lolo to this day and have had a lot of fun checking out the Famicom versions that were based on Lolo 2 and 3 US releases, but with much harder puzzles.
If anyone out there has played the US Lolo games to death and want more challenge, check out the Famicom versions, or if they're not crazy enough for you there are ROM hacks with fan-made levels that will have you pulling your hair out.
As far as I have been able to tell, the H.A.L. Labs that made Taxman has nothing to do with HAL Laboratories. It consisted of two Texas teenagers.
Mobygames and GameFAQs have failed me again....
After Iwata's passing I decided to sample a bunch of games he (may have) worked on, Lolo being one of them. I was super impressed with it but learning how new enemies worked was terrifying (I still have flashbacks getting hit by medusa's eye beams for the first time).
Thanks for highlighting this gem!
At least NP would give future Lolo titles a bit more coverage down the road.
Its funny how sokoban has been a fixture of (real) roguelikes since Nethack, where Shiren just sort of barely grazes past the format as we knew it on PCs.
I played Lolo 1 & 2 a lot as a kid. That immediate sound when the Medusas get you still startles me to this day. 😆
it was the OG jumpscare lol
I remember my brother really liked these games. Very catchy background song that unlike bubble bobble doesn’t get old in two seconds
I dunno, I feel Capcom did a fairly decent remiagining of the Sokoban concept with Goof Troop on the SNES.
Goof Troop, by future Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami!
Would you consider it part of their Higemaru series?
My grandfather loved the Lolo series, and beat all three NES games. From my late grandmother's estate, I received the three games, though the first game wasn't complete in box, and among the Nintendo Power magazines, there was an official strategy guide for Lolo 3.
I've always loved the KO/Give Up animation & sound in Lolo. It perfectly represents how I feel when it happens.
Just wanna yell "Blech-hoooooooo! BLIP"
Loved the OG Lolo (Eggerland) on the MSX.
Lolo's music is stuck in my brain so deep that I still hum it randomly over three decades later!
All three NES Lolo games are great and well worth playing through. Really the only issue I have with them is the music gets old fast. Some of those puzzles stumped me for a while, but I always eventually figured them out.
I freaking love the Eggerland/Adventures of Lolo series! Been playing it ever since my first introduction to Eggerland Mystery back in the 80s. It always warms my heart to see people talking about the series in this day and age.
I first heard of this game through a Homestar Runner cartoon -- surprised it's actually pretty solid!
Moses Malone: "The Adventures of Lolo?! You have better kept the receipt!!"
Quite possibly the worst take H*R ever had.
Surprised how many games made my life a living HAL.
Hal, what would the world of gaming now be if not for them?
Adventures of Lolo is one of those NES classics that I've always heard is one of the system's best, but have never given it a fair shake before. As a massive Kirby fan, I feel like I need to eventually make time to play it
You have to like puzzle games to enjoy them
@@blarghblargh To be fair, I do love me quite the fair share of puzzle games (including Kirby's Avalanche, which is obviously Puyo Puyo), I just haven't played much sukoban in my life, so my younger self just wasn't able to get to into it after a try or two
I loved Lolo and fondly remember my grandma becoming addicted to it as well
Huh -- people I know generally refer to this style of game (top-down, tile-based, puzzle/action) as the "Chip's Challenge genre", but I guess this predates Chip's Challenge by several years! When some friends of mine decided to make a game in this style a some years ago (Bean and Nothingness, it ended up being called) they spent quite a while being like, "OK, so what mechanics can we include to make sure our game isn't effectively just a Chip's Challenge level pack?" Because Chip's Challenge seemingly did it all! Even if it didn't actually do *everything*. But maybe we should be using Lolo/Eggerland as our reference point instead! I haven't played that so I don't know how varied the mechanics are compared to Chip's Challenge.
Of course these days Chip's Challenge is no longer that well known either -- mention a "Chip's Challenge type game" to someone under 30 and they probably won't know what you're talking about. Very much a thing of its time, I suppose. One might suppose that this is because Chip's Challenge cast such a long shadow that everyone else was like "Welp, no need to make a new game of that sort when Chip's Challenge already exists", but the genre doesn't seem to have made any big return now that it's no longer so remembered. Anyway, I guess you'll get to Chip's Challenge whenever you eventually get back to the Lynx, though that will probably be a while I imagine!
Oops -- my second paragraph doesn't quite make sense. Kind of dropped some sentences there. What I meant to say is that the disappearance of the genre seemed like it might be attributable to the expansiveness of Chip's Challenge; not that the forgetting of Chip's Challenge seems likeit might be attributable to that. The latter is what I wrote but the former is what I meant. Dropped a bridging sentence there. Oops.
Oops, silly me, I totally forgot you actually already covered that game! th-cam.com/video/ISbqKfmR7bk/w-d-xo.html But no mention in there of Adventures of Lolo!
If there's a crossover in every episode, it makes the universe feel smaller.
That spread of games that's with Lolo in Nintendo power is pretty special. Amagon, Monster Party and Hydlide true NES "classics" in that they're all needlessly obtuse, incredibly weird or some combination of the two.
Loved this game ! Very difficult, all of them. This game is definitely the precursor to the escape rooms we see today.
Today I learned:
_The Adventures of Lolo_ was actually a port. Neat!
It should be noted that the H.A.L. Labs that made Taxman for the Apple II is a completely seperate American company founded in 1981.
Adventures of Lolo is definitely a good game, and it's nice to see it get a solo episode. Yes, Lolo definitely has very good game design, and is definitely better than the likes of Amagon and Hydlyde. And possibly Jekyll and Hyde next, I'm looking forward to that. What were they thinking?
Jeremy, were you counting just Famicom carts HAL produced that were original creations? Their first self-published game outside of the Japanese home computer circuit was for the Famicom Disk System, called Gall Force, based on the anime property by the same name.
Eggerland also made it to the FDS as well in 1987. And it wasn't just Lolo and Lala that got canonized in Kirby, the blocky enemy at 5:16 was also a mini-boss in Kirby's Dream Land 2 for Game Boy. The Chrontendo overview on the first FDS Eggerland also showed the game had a pretty impressive opening cinematic.
I'm referring to U.S. NES releases here. American kids in 1989 did not know about Gall Force for Famicom.
I owned this game and my dad loved it, it was one of the few games he ever beat. I can still recite by heart the password of the last level: GCVT. You just blew my mind I had no idea that this game was an Eggerland All Stars compilation of sorts of various MSX Japan only games and not a straight translation of a Famicom game!
I don't know HAL you do it, Jeremy. Another banger.
HAL, Lolopen the Pod Bay Doors.
Finally: Sokoban, not Suck-o-ban.
A fun little gem of a game. Lolo has two additional sequels to the first as well, and it feels original as well. If you get stuck, there's a button to even reset the level (lose a life, though).
I’m so glad to see Lolo get more love. This has always been one of my favorite games ever since I was a kid.
One of my favorite puzzle games, I was obsessed with Lolo a couple of years ago
I tried to get my girlfriend into The Adventure of LOLO around 2 years ago, but she wasn't feeling it 😢
My parents and I loved the Lolo trilogy. I never understood why there weren't more games on the SNES.
I read on Wikipedia that HAL became more focused on developing games for Nintendo, such as the Kirby series, after suffering financial problems due to the cost of developing, manufacturing, and advertising Metal Slader Glory, which was released for the Famicom in 1991. Metal Slader Glory's sales were limited because it used the expensive MMC5 chip and Nintendo only sold HAL enough chips for one production run.
Lolo and Lala lived happily ever after, until a few years later, when Kirby broke into their home and murdered them both.
Exactly
8:21 - correction to be made here... you said "Deadly Don Medusa sits quietly in place", but "Medusa" (with no "Don" in its name) is actually the stationary one, the grey one that looks like the mythical Medusa. "Don Medusa" is the pink devil-like one that also kills you when you enter its line of sight, but is mobile.
yup. I jumped on my computer to write this comment too.
medusa is grey.
don medusa is pink.
lolo is still a top tier puzzle game series. I think more could be done with it.
Also not sure why he said there were 20 stages when 5 x 10 = 50, or why he neglected to mention the two Famicom Disk System Eggerlands, one of which directly contributed stages to Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2!
@@BagOfMagicFoodhe talked about eggerland towards the end, didn't he? Or did he just talk about the msx versions?
I remember this one being that dark horse that got a ton of love in the NES Achievers and Power Players Challenge sections of Nintendo Power for years. This one got popular mostly through word of mouth. Sadly I never played it until the 2000s.
i was enjoying the little guitar diddy going into the end credits there
My whole family was obsessed with these games, paticularly my grandma. Great memories.
One of my favorite NES releases. Fantastic video!
Banger start to the new year!!! Great episode!! God damn I love this channel.
I remember really liking this game way back when, which is odd because I don't remember ANY of these more advanced mechanics at all. Riding egg'd enemies over water, blocking enemies from rushing you, Medusas... I remember the graphics and the intro, but the depths of these games were surprises to me. As was them being pre-existing games that were "converted" to NES, but I see the wisdom in making your international releases "best of" compilations.
Kinda wish they could get an NSO-release now...
I recall this was one of only a couple of Lolo games to leave out the "Block an enemy's respawn to make it appear somewhere else" mechanic. So we weren't even introduced to the full depth of challenge possibilities with this beginner's compilation!
I love the Lolo games, my favourite being the third entry in the NES series. I was never great at puzzle games, but this one stuck around for me, and 9 year old me was proud to have finished it, haha. I really wish they could bring Lolo back. Include a level editor that people can share their levels with, and keep the Lolo legacy going!
It just dawned on me... Lolo and Lala attack Kirby by pushing and shoving blocks at him. This game is all about pushing blocks.
The little things you start noticing.
It's weird. While the characters in the Kirby series look like Lolo and Lala from the Eggerland/Adventures of Lolo series of games, they're technically different characters, named Lololo and Lalala (notice the extra syllable in names).
I enjoyed playing this back in the day, but couldn't get that far once the difficulty started to ramp up. 😅
It's funny you open this episode with talk about how influential hal was in the early nes and famicom days when setting up lolo because I think of lolo in the complete opposite terms. It's the thing that Hal worked on before kirby
HAL did far more than just Lolo though. They did back end support on many, many games you know, including SMB.
Sure but I was talking more as clearly HAL branded games rather then just acting as a nintendo support studio@@OnslaughtSix
HAL, NES DNA.
We're getting a bit of a renaissance from you in the New Year, JP. I think all that talk of Epoch has got the wheels turning.
Oh yes I've been waiting for this one
Hal is so good
Lolo games have been either a sprawling free-roaming maze, or worlds divided by sections. I honestly don't know which format to prefer.
There was an urban legend that Lolo eventually turned into Meta Knight.
Have we ever seen both of them in the same game?
Adventures of Lolo absolutely demolishes the real thing. Said whilst shove it the excellent MD version of Sokoban is on screen. Probably Eggerland/Lolo is better but one of the key things about retro gaming is not saying X invalidates Y. Because...it doesn't. Anyway it was an excellent video as usual and much appreciated.
I honestly never considered the connection to sokoban with this one! (which my first taste of was on a high school computer connected to NovaNET, and when I wasn't playing Avatar '84 I did spend some time with its conversion of sokoban.) perhaps I need to give it another look.
The gray enemies that kill Lolo when he gets in their line of sight are just "Medusa"s. Don Medusa is the purple moving version that shoots a sword at you.
Eggerland, of course, is a whole thing that got started on MSX, and was seen in Windows versions as recently as the late 90s. I was surprised to find out that some of the Eggerlands are in fact exploratory puzzle games, that use the various elements we see in Lolo in a huge mappable world, and depending on how you solve a puzzle you can go to different rooms. I've not played much of them myself though, they are pretty difficult, I think?
The only reason I can guess that HAL doesn't keep making Eggerland/Lolo games today is they must have decided they've exhausted the design space.
I wish HAL Labs could make an Eggerland/Adventures of Lolo collection with all the games in one package. Only in an ideal world...
@@MP83 I think that that weird Windows release I mentioned might have been something like that? But I only saw it mentioned like once or twice, I'm not even sure it really exists.
I got reminded from rewatching old Chrontendo episodes that the first Eggerland on Famicom, on FDS, had the maze structure. It might be worth checking into if one wants to try that kind of play.
@@rodneylivesIf you mean "Egger Land for Windows 95" (1996) and its slightly updated re-release "Fukkatsu! Egger Land" (2000), it's the last entry in the series, not a collection. I have both physically.
@@MP83 Ah, excellent! What is needed to run them? Can they still be gotten?
From what I've been able to read, American Lolo 1 was mostly based on the Famicom Disk Eggerland: Sōzō e no Tabidachi, taking the BGM, graphics and all but 15 of the levels (which were swapped out with 15 easier levels from other Eggerland games).
Most of the 15 levels from Eggerland: Sōzō e no Tabidachi not in Lolo 1 were used in Lolo 2.
For both Western Lolo 1 and Lolo 2, most of the levels that weren't taken from Souzouhe no Tabidachi were taken from Meikyuu no Fukkatsu! It's a shame they didn't pull more from the first FDS Eggerland than its music for Lolo 2.
It's kind of funny just how prolific the series was in the 80s. Between the NES/FC/FDS, and not including the different puzzles between regions, there were 5~6 games total games, which is getting close to Mario/Mega Man numbers.
As much as I love Kirby, I really HAL would revisit this series or let Smash Bros have a Trophy/Spirit/Music Track.
Way back I kinda expected Lolo & Lala to join Smash Brothers as Ice Climbers clones.
HAL is other people.
Christ, that strobing effect in the intro sequence of the game nearly gave me a headache. I wonder how many epileptic fits that caused back in the day?
Also, I never realised Lololo and Lalala from Kirby's Dream Land were meant to be from this game. Whoa.
i have a black and white lolo strategy guide and i don't remember if it came with the game or if it was ordered. i vaguely remember it being ordered and it's from hal. it's the same size as an nes box as if it was made to fit in it. that could be why nintendo didn't bother covering it.
HAL-loooo, nurse! These guys were great on the NES. Rollerball is my favorite NES pin sim, even if Rare's games were more flashy.
Also, I would like to know how the NES version of Kangaroo allegedly made by HAL turned out. (Even if HAL's work on those Atari-licensed games felt a little forced.)
One of my favorite nes games.
The Adventures of Lolo is fantastic. 😀👍🎮
The plural of Don Medusa is Don Medusæ… brilliant 😂
Iwata lives on each time I see Lolo
wow, always was curious about this. Cool
I used to play this game all the time. I actually just played a ROM a few months ago too.
Lolo never tips over
I'm a latecomer to the NES party, having been born in 2000. As a teen I quickly learned to appreciate stuff like Contra, Castlevania, Super Mario Bros, Kirby's Adventure, the Legend of Zelda and Faxanadu, but I always stayed away from puzzle games like Lolo because my dumb teenage brain assumed they were dumb and for old people. 🤦♀️🤦♀️ I was dumb because Lolo rocks! And Lolo and his girlfriend even appear in several of the Kirby games, and the Kirby anime, which teenage me loved! (And adult me still loves, but don't tell anyone).
Jeremy I would love to see a video on Kickle Cubicle one day one of my favourite NES games ever
NES Works 1990 kicks off sometime in 2026, it looks like.
Is there a 3D version of this game or even a homage to it. Considering the level of complexity of the 2D title offered a 3D version would be even more compelling. Somebody please make a 3D version of this game.
There was an official PC Eggerland game with higher-resolution sprites of prerendered 3D character models, and I've seen this game emulated in 3D perspectives, but I think that's about it. What do you think the extra dimension could be used for? Just extra topography, like ditches to hide in or allowing eggs to float under bridges, or a whole extra "basement" layer underneath the room that's already in play?
I enjoyed this game when I played it a few years ago but I didn’t have the manual when I did, so the fact you could change the direction of the one-way floor panels wasn’t something I knew you could do with the shooting power when it actually matters on the fifth floor and got incredibly frustrated that I ended up having to look up the solution. I still managed to beat the game.
I’ve played the other games in the series but never beaten them (playing too many Sokoban-esque puzzles in close succession can get dull) and don’t really have any strong memories of them, besides the first Eggerland game made for the Famicom Disk system aka the port of the second MSX game, which I gave up on because that game seemed to require faster reflexes than the others. Shame too, because that game put you in a castle map setting where you puzzles were separate rooms you traveled between and I was curious if there was any real non-linearity in the game.
There’s something funny about Lolo’s appearance in the first Kirby game, so I’ll quote something I wrote for a (now abandoned) book I was writing on Nintendo’s games years ago:
“As an in-joke, the second main boss Kirby fights are the heroes of Eggerland, Lolo and Lala, who attack by (what else) pushing blocks at Kirby. [This would be the duo’s first appearance on Gameboy, on which they would receive one title of their own in 1994. After which, Lolo would no longer star in any games on an Nintendo console.] If Sakurai had intended for this cameo to be symbolical, he couldn’t have made a more perfect choice. Kirby had fought Lolo for the position of HAL’s mascot, and won.”
Why do I feel so mad at never realizing this game is sokuban adjacent
Hey, I'm not messin' with your special lady.
Best part of Lolo was the 4 character password
Jeremy if you didnt already know nethack has a Sokobon segment making it the first game to combine the two genres. The puzzles are static and its just random which one you get but im sure thats probably how shirens worked too.
They are not a very popular part of nethack to be fair.
I'm aware, but Shiren's are more fun.
@@JeremyParish I've yet to sink my teeth into shiren but from your short clip it certainly appears so! Sorry for being nitpicky about your wording😅. It made it seem like the roguelike element was the critical factor.
Sokuban thats good? Hal-lelujah!
The AVGN's most hated game ever is next. I can feel it.
I like Poison and they should be in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. 😀👍🤘🎸🎮
Peak Sokoban = Baba is You, imo
Unfortunately the Lolo games were lost on me as a kid since i didn't care for puzzle games. Ridiculously, unfairly difficult action games? Sure i'll take those. But games that required me use my brain? pls....
We need more Lolo anybody know other games that scratch Lolo unique itch?
Does HAL stand for anything
Yes: Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer
@@JeremyParish gracias, merry new year...thought it was HALKEN, wait was the a space Odyssey joke
LOLO can't pull.
Except for that one Eggerland room where you win a magnet!
Are you gonna cover Color Dreams, Codemasters, and all those other unlicensed publishers at the appropriate times?
Ask again in three weeks
@@JeremyParish wow lookin forward
@@ascfde He did touch gently on them with the Aladdin and such side stories.
@@XanthinZarda good ol' Gentle Touch Jeremy