PIXEL PUZZLE COLLECTION KONAMI CLOUD PATCH
PIXEL PUZZLE COLLECTION KONAMI CLOUD SERIES

There are also invisible question blocks that are revealed by shooting in their location – something I am 100% certain was an inspiration for the treasure chests in T&E Soft’s Undeadline. Find and collect a rook and you’ll get 500 bonus points, a knight will instantly eliminate all enemies and bullets on screen, while a queen pauses the action for 30 seconds and the ultra rare king grants an extra life. There are the chess pieces, which are hidden behind question blocks on the floor and need to be shot to reveal the piece within. There are the really annoying cloud enemies, which drift innocently from side to side but will bolt straight down the screen at speed if you happen to shoot them.īut within that shower of death there’s a lot to collect too. Other enemies will behave more erratically, moving around the screen in an unpredictable pattern. Some enemies simply march down the screen, while others will shoot bullets that slowly drift towards you. Though it’s a simple game on the surface, the way Konami takes all the on-screen elements and moves them around in different patterns and speeds, eventually makes Popolon’s quest a nightmarishly difficult gauntlet.While the screen itself scrolls upwards at a constant rate, the on-screen sprites all behave quite differently and when combined together they can create a sort of frantic, moving maze of death that need to be carefully weaved through without taking a hit. Played with a few extra lives and the level select in your arsenal, Knightmare becomes an achievable, highly enjoyable but still very challenging shoot-‘em-up.

PIXEL PUZZLE COLLECTION KONAMI CLOUD PATCH

I’m not really a fan of the new look Popolon but this is a cool patch nonetheless and well worth checking out. There’s also Knightmare Gold, a pretty snazzy fan-made patch that upgrades the game for MSX2, adding smooth scrolling, Konami’s enhanced music, more detailed sprites and a wider colour palette. Intermission… Although Konami has never ported Knightmare to any other system, and never remade it, they did re-release the original on floppy disk in 1989, complete with enhanced music, unlocked by plugging in the sound cartridge that came with Snatcher. That alone makes it pretty hard going, and mortal players will struggle to get past stage three. You get three as standard, and can earn an extra one for every 100,000 points scored, and there are no continues. What makes it so difficult? For starters, Konami is pretty tight fisted with the extra lives. Sure, the first level is good fun with a nice, gentle difficulty curve, but from stage two onwards, Konami takes the gloves off and gleefully thrashes you with its bloody bare knuckles. Impossible is the word! Despite the cute presentation, this game is called Knightmare for a reason. You’ll love the little blue bugger and you’ll want to protect him throughout his impossible quest. A short, dumpy knight with bright blue armour and characteristic devil horns on his helmet, Popolon is a cute and accessible gateway into this otherwise hostile world. But in game he’s much cuter and more in keeping with the charming Konami aesthetic of the era. On the packaging he looks like a generic medieval hero and not much different to one you’d have seen on an Atari 2600 box half a decade earlier. I find the main character, Popolon, much more interesting though. It’s standard “rescue the princess: fare, with a Greek myth theme, so you’re battling through a few stages to rescue Aphrodite, the Goddess of love. I won’t get too bogged down in the plot of Knightmare, as there really isn’t much of one to speak of. Although it’s easily the most simple and straightforward game in the series, it’s by no means uninteresting. But for now, let’s concentrate on that first entry.

PIXEL PUZZLE COLLECTION KONAMI CLOUD SERIES

I can’t think of many (any?) other game series that so radically change from one entry to the next, so I’ll be covering the Knightmare trilogy with great interest over the next three weeks on this blog. While the third and final game, Shalom, evolved again into a text heavy adventure-RPG.

The sequel, Maze Of Galious, is a non-linear exploratory platform game packed with secrets, and was a huge influence on La Mulana. The mythical theme and characters remain through all three games, but the gameplay style wildy changes from one to the other. Knightmare is also notable because it’s the first game in a trilogy that continually reinvents itself and plays around with genre conventions. I’m not sure what you’d call this genre but I think it may well have begun with Knightmare, a shmup that started life in the home rather than the arcade and feels noticeably different to its Konami MSX stablemates like Gradius or Salamander in that space, and ships, are nowhere to be seen.

Pixel puzzle collection konami cloud