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A quick side dalliance in one of my long-simmering projects before we dive back into the NES in earnest. At some point in the relatively near future, this series will converge with NES Works... won't that be something?

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Pitfall II retrospective: Get Lost | Metroidvania Works #007

The sequel to Pitfall! gives us an even more expansive world to explore than pioneers like Montezuma's Revenge: A system of underground caverns comprising roughly 250 screens of virtual real estate. Sure, about 50 of those screens amount to columns of empty air, but the underlying concept has merit. Pitfall II downplayed white-knuckle action in favor of unraveling the pathways and interconnections of its subterranean world in order to explore every corner, score points, and complete an objective. Also in this episode, we check in on the progress of the action RPG genre with Falcom's Dragon Slayer and T&E Soft's Hydlide.

Comments

John Simon

Back in 1987 a friend of a friend was dumping his entire Atari 2600 Collection for NES so I got a big pile of games with no boxes or instructions or context* and wound up playing Pitfall II before I. From the second you start you know you're playing something Really Special. The map is HUUUGE. They're doing a bit of what they did in Pitfall 1 where the each screen is a collection of major and minor features and the levels are a combination of them, but this time there's even more variation, and lots of verticality. There's also the neat design bit where you end at the beginning of the map. The music is dynamic, too. Get hit and it switches to a minor key for a bit, collect gold and it switches to an upbeat part of the tune. * and some truly inexplicable titles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZsCDIfyh6A