Glover

 N64, Glover (1998) game

The N64 is in large part a home of the 3D platformer and is a defining piece of the machine to me. But what do you do when you've played all the big platform games? You begin to explore the lesser known titles, the ones that didn't score so highly in N64 Magazine. It's only taken me around twenty-five years to get to 'Glover' and funnily enough, this is the only N64 game I remember seeing advertised on TV! It did interest me, but not to the extent of buying it at the time (it came out before I even owned an N64, too, since the game was released the year before I bought my console). Perhaps I never saw it going cheaply in the years after, and more pertinently I've never been as interested in puzzle games as I have in the freedoms to explore and experiment the best 3D platformers have afforded. Yet I always carried this one in mind over the years and finally got my hands on a copy, eventually leading me to play it as my summer N64 game, a tradition of the past few years. Platforming standards were high on the N64, two of my favourite all-time games were in that genre ('Banjo-Kazooie' and 'Donkey Kong 64'), with others close behind ('Super Mario 64' and 'Banjo-Tooie'), so it was always going to be a tough school to break into my affections, and certainly at first I found it on the level of the weak 'Starshot: Space Circus Fever' as a bit of a disappointment, though that eventually rose to the level of fellow puzzle-platformer 'Space Station Silicon Valley' of okay-ish gaming quality.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but while I have found a certain satisfaction in beating the hardest parts, it never grew on me to the extent I could happily call it a good game (unlike, say, last year's summer platform-puzzler, 'Blast Corps,' of which I still have happy memories despite it generally being much harder). Part of that, if only a small part, is down to the first-generation graphics, which, while not as scrappy as parts of 'Body Harvest' (released in the same year, but much more ambitious in scope), include a lot of average textures and little of the beauty seen on the title screen as we travel around the main hub with its grassy greenness and imposing wizard's castle dominating the landscape. So far, so much more 'Super Mario 64' than 'Banjo-Kazooie,' which, while many would argue for the purity of gameplay in Mario's first 3D adventure, I prefer the atmosphere and inherent freedom in Banjo's first outing, the latter really showing the swift grasp on the N64's power and potential by Rare (that also came out in 1998!). Graphics aren't the most important aspect of a game, of course - if that were so why would anyone be playing old games at all since the newest, shiniest releases would easily put them to shame, though I'd also argue that in the same way art mediums have different attractions for different people, I love many of the visual styles of the past, whether they were enforced by processor size or were a deliberate artistic choice, so either way a game can be successful or not in the arena dependent on subjective views.

Sound is a little more of an issue - rain down a beautiful, ethereal theme or a catchy tune, and it can do much to enhance the involvement of a player, but if you get it wrong it can simply annoy. 'Glover' tends to fall more in the latter category than the former with often somewhat grating background music, though they include the option to change the volume of both music and sound effects independently so that's a boon, if adding further irritation by the lack of such changes in-game, only allowing them to be made from the main screen! That brings us neatly on to the technical flaws of the whole: there's a lot of fogging and pop-up as was common in many a title of this era unless they were technically gifted in their programming. Sometimes it doesn't make that much difference, can even add to the atmosphere in some cases, such as 'Turok: Dinosaur Hunter,' but when you have levels where you're not quite sure where to go it can be a bit annoying that things aren't clear enough to plan a route and you can sometimes find yourself having to leap into the unknown, never a sign of good game design. I could criticise the stereotypical choices for level theme, but they're age-old clichés of the kind that have been around since platforming became a genre: you've got the sandy beach and running waters of 'Atlantis,' the cartoonish bright colours of a circus in 'Carnival,' more watery beach style coupled with ships in 'Pirates,' an ancient landscape of lava and stone with 'Prehistoric,' the tropes of classic horror in 'Fortress of Fear,' and the obligatory space level of 'Out of This World.'

It's not that the ideas are bad, the puzzling isn't too bad at all, though I was stumped (by the stump part of a palm tree no less!), by one particular head-scratcher in 'Prehistoric 3,' but more on that later. It's pretty standard stuff and the game eases you in gently (until you reach the Bonus level at the end of the first world, a version of 'Frogger' that requires serious learning on the precise movements you have to make to succeed!), with both a Practice level that teaches the basics, and a first level that requires the use of your knowledge, but is in no way taxing, as you'd expect. I wasn't fully conversant with the game's language at first, such as the fact you can't kill some enemies, only stun them, or for another example, I didn't realise to begin with the magic cards you're supposed to collect were required to unlock the Bonus level at the end of each world, nor that some were well hidden, they just appeared to be a way of getting a good score - run into them as the little glove man of the title and you score less points than if you manoeuvre the magic ball (there's a lot of magic stuff), into them, even more if you do it with the ball in its fragile natural crystal state - it fell from the towers of the wizard's castle into each world and needs to be returned... Yes, the 'plot' is pretty terrible, but that could often be the way with old, old games so it's continuing a quaint tradition in that sense and if the gameplay works the story is going to be pretty irrelevant to how much you enjoy the experience anyway.

To score the most points you have to collect as many cards in quick succession as possible - you're able to do that for little batches as they tend to be in clumps, though controlling the ball can be tricky as you have the realistic physics of an actual disembodied glove (if such a thing were possible!), that grabs this spherical bounty and requires more effort to push it up slopes, or reacts to the contours of the terrain, as you'd expect a ball to. You can bounce it, you can throw it, you can bounce and then throw it from the apex for maximum height, and they managed to work in a number of moves to enable movement of this precious item to the end goal so it can return to its rightful place on the castle and restore the wizard. It's a slim motivation for the action, but it gets things to the point of doing - I hate to complain about a game's controls and keep revisiting this criticism recently, whether it be 'Super Mario Galaxy 2,' 'Sleepwalker' or 'XIII' I've expressed my discontent repeatedly, but the situation crops up again with this one: controls are awkward. Part of that is the learning curve of understanding the game's language in both how puzzles work and how to interact with this slippery, but vital item you control. Glover himself, when divorced from the ball, can walk about independently, jump and double-jump, even crawl flat on the floor (though I don't remember that ever being implemented in any puzzles other than a way to avoid the blast of 'living' sticks of dynamite, one of the later enemies you encounter), but he's quite slow, there's strangely little use of the analogue stick's levels of sensitivity, or at least there is, but the full pressure applied doesn't result in much pace.

I suppose when you've only got two 'fingers' for legs you aren't going to get about very quickly, and a player probably does value the incremental movements when at platform edges and with threats all around, but it can still be irksome when crossing large distances. Even with the ball 'in hand' you don't roll along all that quickly and I could never decide if it was quicker to do a straight roll or to dribble the ball, bouncing it repeatedly. Speed tended to be more of an issue when you're trying to beat the Time Trials which was a whole other side to the game, though a much-needed one since the main story was over quicker than I was expecting - there are six levels divided into three standard platforming sections, then a Boss level and the Bonus level (which isn't required to complete the game, unless you want a 100% rating, which I did), which isn't too bad, but I was expecting a final confrontation level in the castle itself, as so often happens - a final test of all the skills and knowledge you've gained. Instead you beat your mirror opposite, the evil glove (yeah, don't ask!), the wizard pops out of his castle and it's game over, simple as that. Not that it was the kind of game I wished would go on, and in fact I didn't originally plan to beat the Time Trials as it would seem like a chore to keep playing when I'd done just about everything there was to do - except I hadn't, there was a Bonus ('Frogger'-ish), a couple of levels where I hadn't located all the cards ('Prehistoric 1' and '3'), and the Bonus level at the end of that world.

Time-trialling gave me an easier task to accomplish between the tricky bits of those others, which is why I made the effort. And by then I was comfortable with the controls and how everything worked and the game had settled down from the restrictive, high frustration levels of earlier to an acceptable experience, if not necessarily the most fun. I'd have described it early on as like playing 'Super Mario 64' if Mario was a water balloon crossed with a Slinky, and while I can praise the game for managing to incorporate so many moves, they could be confusing and took a long while to become second nature. Even then it was very easy to make a mistake and either press the wrong button or hold it for the wrong amount of time: press A to lob the ball, hold A to hit the ball, press B to bounce the ball, hold B to throw the ball in an arc, and combinations of such. You could also jump on the ball and use it as a trampoline or control it by running about on top of it, useful for traversing water where it was too deep to get a grip of the ball (having no legs Glover couldn't swim and use the ball as a float), the downside being controls were reversed making life more difficult (this was a deliberate attempt to increase difficulty as on the Easy level controls weren't reversed, according to the manual). Making things needlessly hard to control isn't something that endears me to a game, and coupled with the frustration of being too easily ruined by a careless mistake in the controls with plenty of instant death potential, as well as the odd glitch, took away from what could have been a classic.

Glitches were encountered as early as 'Atlantis 3' where you dropped down the side of a cliff to a 'secret' cave in which a foreboding black obelisk stood - if you pushed into this shape you'd appear in another area, but couldn't move. I tried several times to do it, but each time the same result, the only way to escape was to quit out of the game, very bad design! Until I patted the ball in ahead of me and for some reason when I walked in separately I appeared atop the ball in this other cave and could move around. I can't imagine this was meant to be, but if it was there was no indication of what you were supposed to do, or why! The other glitchy thing was the camera itself which acted like it was your enemy (hindered by some unintuitive button mapping such as 'R' used to magic your ball into a different material, bouncy ball, bowling ball, magnetic ballbearing or crystal, rather than centring the camera behind you as in most 3D games), and would get stuck on scenery so that you could run off into another part, unable to see yourself since the camera was still 'outside' a location (for example going into the small cave at the base of the cliff beneath the stone circle in 'Prehistoric 3'), or almost as bad, it would insist on a particular angle and didn't like me trying to circle the view. Or if you were close to a wall and zoomed in to look around you, the camera couldn't move because of the wall... None of this exactly inspired confidence, which is why I take less shame in admitting I did have to look up the solution to one, final puzzle - I located the last of the cards in 'Prehistoric 1' hidden behind a wall where there were slight cracks, so I suspected the last set of cards in 'Prehistoric 3' would follow the same logic and spent a long time searching along every wall and floor without the merest hint of a crack.

Most puzzles weren't this difficult and I began to think there was something wrong when I finally caved and input the cheat to locate the nearest cards in a level (Glover turns into a pointing hand to indicate direction). I felt this was a reasonable option since I'd exhausted all possibilities I could think of and the cheat had been given to me in the end credits upon completion of the game, but when I'd collected all the usual cards and then activated the pointer it veered all over the place like it was broken and that was the point I thought there might be a glitch so I dug out my trusty N64 Magazine booklet guide and found the solution was as simple as getting the Triceratops female, who runs after you with love hearts streaming from her if you came close enough, to follow you and hit a palm tree with a tiny love heart symbol on it! The annoying thing was that I'd already tried this tactic on other parts of the scenery in that area, maybe even that tree, but had never noticed the heart symbol. For the most part the game was a test of skill more than observation or brain power, and while I'd say finding those last cards was technically the hardest, simply because I could not do it and had to get help, in terms of testing my ability the 'Frogger' Bonus was the toughest thing in the game: I spent hours trying to judge the timing and distance of jumping this frog from block to lily pad to log - it took me a long time to recognise the distances were very particular so that you needed to use either a sideways leap or a diagonal one, and even then it was easy to get out of the right line, but do it I did.

And that wasn't even the toughest thing in the game after all: the 'Prehistoric' Bonus level was even more challenging, being a run towards camera down this tunnel full of pitfalls with a wall of fire chasing you... And you have to collect all 60 cards... And you have to time everything exactly right since here you're playing the ball itself and have to bounce to get some of them which slows you down... And, I have to admit, at time of writing I haven't yet succeeded so I'm stuck at 98% completion, though I'll keep trying. I will say the game was reassuringly structured with its repetition of three levels, Boss and Bonus, and even the familiar world themes are slightly pleasant for being such tropes that sometimes it was close to being a little taste of 'Banjo,' yet it really wasn't close to the technical achievement of that seminal title and had far too much that seemed like it was almost designed to make you froth at the mouth, it was so unfair - sometimes I'd beat a Boss and didn't even know how I'd done it, it was just suddenly over! And while I commend them for including Hi-Score tables and Time Trials (which you can either do 'in-game' where you have the advantage of using Checkpoints if you die, or the external option from the main screen where you don't and have only until the clock counts down from the best time - the only level that really challenged me was 'Carnival 3' where you have so little time and so much to do), neither of these things have ever really been a strong game-lengthening motivation to me as a rule.

I will praise them for the many save files they included, one of the most I've seen as an on-cartridge option, equalling the six of 'Jet Force Gemini,' an addition that could promote multiple people to compete against each other for scores and times, all sharing the same cart, which is a great idea, though for me it was just myself and it's also less impressive when you realise the levels are generally fairly small, plus all the added technical limitations, it shouldn't be so much of a surprise they could allow for so many files. But my final opinion is that 'Glover' was conceptually sound, but needed a stronger design and programming team for the best implementation, much like 'Space Station Silicon Valley' or 'Bomberman 64,' and I can imagine an updated version could be a vast improvement. But for the purposes of review I can only regard what is before me, and this didn't quite make it - I'm not a lover of 'Glover,' too much of a bother.

**