Elf

Amiga 1200, Elf (1991), game

A cross between a traditional side-scrolling shoot-'em-up, 'Super Mario' clone and elements of roleplaying games' swapping items to progress, this must have been quite the 'biz' back in 1991 when it was released by Ocean. It looks beautiful, pixel graphics have their own great artistic merit and neatness that realism can't equal, and this was made at the height of pixellated visuals a few years before 3D graphics would become the norm. I originally played this in the late 90s on my Amiga until I got stuck on the fifth level and never could get up the endurance to keep plugging away at it until I solved the puzzle (there were no walkthroughs available at the touch of a mouse button to permeate the gloom - not that I needed internet guidance this time as it wasn't that difficult, even if my eventual breakthrough did come about by complete chance which never makes a game seem fair). 'Elf' was another of those games tucked away in the back of my mind that I planned to revisit with the CD32 controller I'd discovered back in about 2010 which had made playing 'The Speris Legacy' such a joy. This game demanded to be broken, and it was.

The difficulty curve is uneven, there are technical limitations of the time it was made, and it has some strange ways of doing things. For example, rather than keeping a saved file on a blank disc or storing on a Hard Drive (they were rare or nonexistent at that time), you save it directly to the Amiga's memory, between the F1-F8 keys. This is handy if you come to play the game years later (though I would have kept the save disk with the game disks anyway), but it's frustrating if you want to play more than one game since the levels can only be saved one per F-key. If more than one person wanted to play, someone would have to have one of the levels overwritten, and I can just imagine how easy it would be to press the wrong key and save progress over a level you planned to have another go at, perhaps to complete with more points or lives. It was fortuitous for me that I got stuck when I did - exactly the same place I'd left the game fifteen-odd years before: level five, the dwarf caves. If I had overwritten that particular level I'd have had to restart the game almost from the start as on this run-through I hadn't picked up something vital to progress.

Allowing players to make game-changing mistakes is a sign of the illogical flaws that show up from time to time, and is a terrible thing to comprehend in these enlightened times when games are generally so much easier and game design doesn't, or shouldn't, allow for a player to be forced to restart almost from the beginning because they did something that wasn't exactly in line with the creator's plan. What I'm dancing around is my own mistake to ensure I had retrieved the silver flute from the Pie-Eyed Piper back in the second level. In fairness, the guy who told me I needed to give the flute to the Piper also mentioned I should get it back afterwards, and on playing the level through a few times I generally did pick up the item because I accidentally shot the Piper after he'd done his job of getting rid of the rats in the underground tunnel, but I wanted to see what happened if I didn't shoot the Piper (plus I was replaying to get as many lives as possible to make the next level easier). Nothing happened when I didn't shoot the Piper, except of course I didn't get the flute back, which I didn't realise at the time. Unfortunately for me that was the time I was satisfied with the number of lives I'd earned and so progressed to the next level. Only when I got to the caves and needed a bit of metal did I realise I needed the flute, and only then because I played through my old file to see if I'd had anything there that I didn't have this time! So as I said, it was fortunate for me that I had the old save file to rescue me or I'd have had to start again from the second level.

That wasn't the only example of the player having to do exactly what they're told and being allowed to fall into a situation where it was impossible to progress: again with the Piper, if you dropped down into his area without first finding the dynamite, you were stuck there with no way out and had to restart the level, and if you unlocked his cage before first giving him the flute, he disappears and you can't get past the rats! It doesn't exactly encourage exploration… But this was made in a different time when difficult games were normal, and instant death a common occurrence (I think of the 'Rick Dangerous' games with deadly traps at every turn as a prime example). In that regard this was leaps and bounds ahead of many other platform games just because you didn't need to complete it in one sitting, but could save at the end of a level, giving you the option to revisit an earlier one, as I did, in order to get yourself into better shape lives-wise if a level was too tough. One thing about the game, despite it being better to play than some (for example, the massive 'Robocod' that had to be completed in one go, from the start, every time), was that, to begin with at least, there weren't sudden death moments that ate up lives. The first level takes you by the hand and is a good introduction to the mechanics of the game (even though you're still thrown right into the action thanks to the number of enemies that fly, scuttle or leap across the screen). You can fall to your death from the higher platforms, but it's your fault, and teaches you the value of buying the wolf outfit which enables falls from any height without damage.

It also introduces you to the puzzles that make this more than just a platform game with pretensions to shoot-em-up: finding items to swap with in-game characters. There's an art to the conversations you have with these people that can be used to your advantage (though not in the way 'Supercars 2' allowed you to play off the car salesman to get better deals if you said the right thing). That is, the instruction booklet started you off with the two most essential words to say: 'Help' and 'Want,' meaning the characters would tell you how they could help you and what they wanted before they would. If you picked out key words from their responses you could find other clues, which gave the game a little added depth as you unravelled a bit more narrative about them or the game, though for the most part you could get by with the two main words. An example of when digging was necessary was in the penultimate land, the snowy mountain, in which you had to use an elvish page of runes to attack a wizard in order to get the next item, but it was more natural to give it to him which meant, like the Pie-Eyed Piper situation before it, you were stuck with no way to progress from the level. But if you'd talked to him a bit you'd have learnt that he had something you needed and might have more easily worked out that you would have to attack him.

If the 'Talk' option was useful, yet relatively simple, not all of them were. I don't remember ever having to 'Bribe' someone, and there were few times when you had to 'Attack ' or 'Activate' something. I wonder if they originally had bigger plans which never came to full fruition? Something that was used well, for the most part, were the upgrades you could buy at the shop in exchange for the plants and animals you picked up on your travels: there were things to make life easier, such as a short-lived forcefield (though again, you would assume that such an item would have meant you were invulnerable to all creatures, so when you still die on contact with the flying gargoyle-type things in a section of the dwarf caves it feels unfair until you realise you need a specific item to progress - the flute, which is turned into a silver crucifix), a dwarven mail-shirt (inspired by 'The Lord of The Rings,' I wonder?), though that could only be bought in the caves, life-restoring bottles, an amusing, though completely useless hint option, invaluable extra lives, and most usefully, a flying machine. I had mixed feelings about that last one. It made the levels it appeared in so much easier, and they must have realised that they'd given you too much freedom as for most of the levels it's taken away from you with no explanation. It certainly would have made the tough lake and swamp levels a breeze, but those levels in which you did get to fly were more interesting and had more scope anyway.

The flying machine may have been a mistake in game terms, making things too easy, but it was great fun zipping around the screen and added to the fun of the game, especially on the first level when you'd gone around on foot the whole time, climbing ladders and jumping enemies, that it was a real relief. The wolf, while useful, wasn't essential, and nor was the other special option of your character, Cornelius, becoming immune to projectiles by wearing shades… Not sure why shades, but it could be useful for levels where you weren't likely to fall to your death and thus lose the power you'd spent hard-earned resources to get. There was a balance to be had between risking loss of energy or even life in order to build up your supplies of plants and cute animals which made for a slightly more tactical game (just as deciding which of the three powers Cornelius should have, as you could only hold one at a time), though for the most part it was better not to risk lives if you could help it. The game was also tactical in that you only had five slots to carry items in, which meant you were sometimes forced to use up a health-giving bottle to make room for something else.

You did have the option to drop items by cycling through them when standing over another item, which could be useful, but most of the time the bottles were the things taking up space and you could get by without them - there were times when I was low on health that I would find a 'safe' screen (one that didn't have too many platforms for enemies to drop down from, and no drops off the bottom), and keep shooting enemies until I'd picked up sufficient life-replenishing hearts - enemies would mostly drop gems or point-giving items, but after a while they'd leave a heart, so you were never short of opportunities to recover your energy, though it could be risky if you were very low, as enemies could come from anywhere, left or right, high or low. You soon realised that upgrading your weapon was the key to survival, because once you had triple shots firing diagonally up, diagonally down, and across, you were sure to hit everything. The option to use throwing bombs, even though they were more powerful than shots, was really only useful against the end of level bosses, and they were mostly easy to defeat on your first encounter anyway.

An attempt was made to throw you out of your comfort zone in the same manner as the flying machine removal, when you start the snowy mountain area and find the cold has made your weapon unreliable and intermittent. But having studied the available products to buy in the shop from the first level, you knew that at some point you'd need anti-freeze, so there was no concern about what you had to do. It might have been better to include area-specific items only in shops of those areas, but seeing the anti-freeze that you couldn't buy from the first level gave you a sense of anticipation of future locations, so it worked in that sense. They did go to the trouble of making the shop doorways fit the style of the level, too, with my favourite being the Hobbit-like circular doors in the caves. One thing that did leave me wondering was that there were some locked doors in certain levels that I could never pass (the caves and the castle, I think, although the ones you couldn't enter in the castle were just part of the background design).

The difficulty curve was more of a heart monitor, jumping up and down without a great deal of consistency. It stands to reason that the first level is the easiest, and the second about the same (made tougher by removal of the flight option), but then the lake and swamp introduced instant falls to your death at the bottom of pretty much every screen! For me, and this was borne out in the fact that I got stuck there both originally, and on this play-through, the dwarf caves were the hardest level in the game. It wasn't so much unfair to continue the death drops of the lake and swamp, and mix it with the item-carrying of the first two levels, as that makes sense, or to make it more difficult as a whole. What was unfair was making progress by chance (my original failure to progress due to not standing in front of the STOP sign next to the green monster after having fed him the bone), and the fact that the visuals could make it hard to see exactly what was solid ground you could stand on, and what wasn't (a problem much more evident in the final, two-part castle level). The backgrounds were kind of brown, as were the platforms, and while it wasn't such a problem as the castle, it was an issue. The visuals in general were well-designed, with graphical tricks such as reflections at the bottom of the screen in the lake and swamp levels, a pleasing colour palette for the most part, and simple, but attractive animation. There were the usual tropes of ice world, jungle, castle, etc, so they weren't exactly pushing the boat out in plot terms, but they were all nicely done.

The plot was the same as 'Super Mario' - Cornelius must rescue girlfriend Elisa from the clutches of the evil Necrilous, but the game had a sense of humour so it's a bit self-mocking. One part of the humour I didn't like, however, was the dark streak running through it, most notable in the ill-judged execution scene that would play if you lost all your lives, Cornelius in silhouette on top of a hill, the guillotine dropping and his head bouncing messily down the hill to the sound of maniacal laughter in bad taste and not what you'd expect in a family friendly game! It is shown in silhouette, and there is the option to turn it off from the main screen, and it's also worth noting that games weren't as scrutinised at that time - I don't think age ratings had even come in then. True to the black humour is the ending if you successfully destroy all the winching mechanisms holding Elisa suspended over a vat of bubbling green evil. You save her, only to be told you shot one too many cuddly creatures and she's become an ugly, drooling woman who chases you across the screen! At first I wondered if it was possible to complete the game and not shoot too many of the innocent creatures that roam the levels providing accidental cannon fodder, (especially as there's more than one ending to see - if you fail to shoot all the mechanisms, easy to do as there's no tone or notification to tell you, you see a heartbroken Cornelius and the message that though you beat Necrilous, she died, an angelic version rising up the screen), but then I thought it more likely the makers' sense of humour. I wonder if anyone went back through, carefully avoiding cuddly destruction thinking there would be a different result?

As a game to play today I found it quite fun, even though I didn't have strong feelings of nostalgia, and again, I think that can be put down to the comparatively excellent CD32 controller - before that, you had to deal with huge joysticks which could give you blisters from extended play, and buttons that could lose their responsiveness (I could probably do a whole review on the qualities of the various joysticks I used in those days, The Bug probably being the best). That's one thing that changed for the better with much more ergonomic modes of control as the years rolled by and technology improved. It's hard to imagine some of the technical limitations of the past without experiencing them, foremost for me being this game's inability to play both music and sound effects at the same time (though even as late as the N64 that was a problem - on 'Mario Kart 64' you lost the music in multiplayer!), making you choose between them on the main screen. I liked most of the music, though repetitive after a while, it shows how catchy it was that the lake and swamp theme had stayed in my head all those years. There was a bit of laziness with certain levels featuring the same as others if they were thematically linked (lake and swamp, or the castle levels), and the finale just had the title theme again, but I imagine time and budget played their part in that, and in game-playing terms it was best to choose the SFX to get more feedback from shooting or picking up items (which you sometimes might not have seen, so the aural notification was useful).

The game isn't short of secrets, with walls to be broken and high platforms in the flying machine levels, but the best hidden were the bonus areas that could only be found if you stepped in a particular place, such as on a particular cloud - for some reason they were in black and white, which made a cool visual change, although I can't explain why the exit of these was clearly the TARDIS from 'Dr. Who'! Attention to detail was nice, the various environments were done well, and I enjoyed the game much more than if it had been a straight shoot-em-up, but ultimately it was a little constricting in what you had to do and how, and there was frustration when the third and fourth levels turn into a left to right jump-and-instant-death-drop-athon with only a modicum of the collecting and exchanging of items presented in the first two levels. The variety should have been welcome, but I'd have preferred a more consistent set of levels like the first two and the mountain, and a more gradual level of difficulty. I can't say the game was too difficult, so overall it was pitched right, and as I mentioned before, compared with other games in the genre of this time on the Amiga it was probably one of the best. Difficult enough to slow you down, but not to put you off playing forever, even if it takes fifteen years to come back to it!

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