Another Great Use for the Analogue Pocket with Save States

I’ve been gushing about the Analogue Pocket portable for over a year now, lauding its crisp screen and its ability to create “save states” anywhere in a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance game while playing. These saves are created on a regular everyday micro SD card thingy plugged into the device.

This ability has allowed me to play through old 2D platformer games without having to repeat difficult sections or battles. Traditionally those games have no save points at all, just continues, making repetition the difficult part of playing those games to completion.

For games that do have saves built into them, the Analogue Pocket’s save states can be a good secondary save option. A game may only save at the end of each level by design, for example, but with save states one can create convenient mid-level saves. 

Finally, I’m starting to see the save batteries fail in Game Boy games older than thirty years. My saves on the Final Fantasy Legend trilogy, for example, are all gone. Thanks to the save states of the Analogue Pocket, those games are still playable by using the micro SD card to create saves instead, should I desire to play those games again.

A new use occurred to me the other day: use the save states to save high scores on arcade games that do not have a battery backup. Games without the battery only save the high scores for each session of gameplay, and the scores are erased as soon as the game is turned off. With the save state on the Analogue Pocket, one can save their high scores for much longer. 

I’m testing it with Xevious for the Game Boy Advance. That mid-eighties arcade classic holds a special place in my heart as it was in the student rec room at Mansfield OSU when I was taking classes there, but I digress:

That’s not a very high score yet, but I just started playing it again.

The ability to play old games with new hardware has been a middle aged joy for me. Finding clever ways to enhance those games using features like save states just adds to their value.

Beaten: Powerslave Exhumed (Saturn/One)

 I've been getting my fix of late 1990s first person shooters over the past few years, beating Marathon:Durandal and Quake for example, but when I saw that Powerslave Exhumed was available I had to get it, as the original Powerslave was one of my "unfinished business" games, which are games that I played in the past but never beat. 

I had purchased the Sega Saturn version of Powerslave in late 1996 as it beat the Playstation version to market for some reason. My purchase of the Sega Saturn at release in May of 1995 had proven to be a mistake once Sony released the Playstation later that year. By late 1996 Sony had clearly already vanquished the Saturn by having games like Wipeout, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider out, so I felt that I needed to boost my Saturn library, and Powerslave sounded cool.

I cannot remember where I was stuck, but it might have been on the first boss, Set. So I downloaded Powerslave Exhumed, a modern port for consoles and PC created by Night Dive Studios that retains the graphics and gameplay of the original. Since the original was so good, that is a plus.

It's a first person shooter, sure, but also a first person platformer at times, getting both gameplay aspects right. The other awesome aspect of this game is it's "Metroidvania" style of progression, created well before that was a word, meaning that the player opens up areas as they go and those areas will require repeated visits once the player acquires new items. Some areas, for examples, have multiple exits with one of them on a high ledge, meaning the player needs to acquire a certain artifact to make the jump.

Powerslave was an Iron Maiden album before it was a game, with a cool ancient Egyptian theme, and the game Powerslave recreates that theme in each level. The levels are large and varied in theme, each with the standard 1990s keys and doors that must be acquired and used during each visit to that level. So the backtracking one does is not that easy, as each key needs to be reacquired and each door reopened, every time one goes through the level.

It's not frustrating, though, as the level design is absolutely awesome, making levels fun to revisit. The weapons keep coming throughout one's playthrough, and once acquired, they remain in one's inventory forever. Starting with a sword (great for underwater fish fights), the player gets a pistol, a large machine gun, a grenade, and then some interesting magical weapons like a snake staff, a fireball ring, and a lightning bolt spell before it's all done. 

Ammo drops from fallen enemies are generic, meaning that whatever weapon one is holding will get the ammo refilled. So if the player is low on machine gun ammo but was using the pistol to kill enemies and some ammo drops, the player must switch to the machine gun before picking up the ammo.

There are a few boss fights, and they are memorable and challenging, but there’s no health meters on these guys, so just keep shooting and moving. While Set gave me some trouble again (I almost gave up there again), I got the final boss on my first try.

The wave of first person shooters following Doom were often creative in their attempts to stand out in the crowd, but the under appreciated Powerslave had more going on in it than I realized back in late 1996. I’m glad the folks at Night Dive Studios released Powerslave Exhumed so I could wrap up that bit of unfinished business.

Beaten: Grand Theft Auto 3 The Definitive Edition (PS4)

There are lots of games I missed over the years, but in 2001 when Grand Theft Auto 3 landed on the Playstation 2, I was off in MMORPG land, playing Ultima Online, and not really paying attention to consoles anymore. Of course I heard about it from all sorts of media and from co-workers who were playing it, but I was too busy with UO and the fansite I had to take notice.

Not that third person open world traversal was all that new to me in gaming (Tail of the Sun on PS1), but the model was solidified with GTA 3. In its aftermath I enjoyed The Simpsons Hit and Run on the Gamecube and later Bully on the Wii before finally getting on board with Grand Theft Auto 4 in August of 2008 on my shiny new XBox 360. 

With the long wait for GTA 6 supposedly ending later this year, I decided to go back to the roots of all this mayhem with Grand Theft Auto 3 The Definitive Edition and just try it out to see if it could hook me. I could have gotten the PS2 version and played it as it was released, but the Definitive Edition has multiple graphic, control, and interface improvements that reduced the frustration of missions that require multiple attempts. The icing on the cake was playing it on my PS5, with load times reduced to seconds.

The core story and gameplay are all intact and GTA 3 reminded me of how much I love the chaos that sometimes comes with these games. The physics of how cars handle takes getting used to as they seem to be lighter than they should be and even a low speed collision can have silly physics consequences.

The story is about what I expected with the glaring exception of the player’s character being mute. It works as a storytelling device as the cast of criminal underworld characters gets to shine with their demands. Cut scenes are all made from the in-game engine and the blocky characters are good for 2001. Whatever level of upgrade they did graphically kept the 2001 look but polished it up really well. Performance is quick and smooth.

The missions that make up the main story are varied, with some on strict time limits. Normally these time limit missions frustrate me, but GTA 3 is so well designed that all it took for most of them are repeated tries once one figures out what to do. One such tight-on-time mission required the player to take out a series of taco stands across all three islands in under nine minutes. It felt impossible at first, but once I realized that they are in the same location during every attempt, it was matter of memorizing those locations, figuring out the most efficient route, and then trying it a few times until I got it right.

Another great design standard established in GTA 3 is the balance between exploration and story progress. By that I mean, if the player follows the story missions, they are introduced to enough of the map to understand the basics of traversal across the three islands and the waterways between them. For explorers like me, the rewards were great enough to give the maps a little more scrutiny. Players can find spawns of health restoring hearts, essential body armor, weapons, and hidden packages by checking out incredibly well-designed map.

The hidden packages were fun enough that I spent a little more time searching for them, and the reward granted for every 10 recovered - a weapon spawn at one' s hideouts - was also worthwhile. I got to about 82 of them, and in the searching I got to to the hidden area in the screenshot above. Other side missions were fun to varying degrees but I did not delve too deep into them.

I had so much fun playing this landmark game over the last month, which is so well made that even the frustrating parts - mostly time limit missions - were manageable and even fun to repeat. Like real life, even when you plan every detail out, running a mission in Grand Theft Auto The Definitive Edition can go a lot of unexpected and crazy ways that are usually so chaotic and silly that one can't help but laugh.

Beaten: Wizards & Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear (Gameboy)

One of the hardest action-platformers I had left unfinished for the Game Boy was Wizards & Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear, a continuation of the NES game series. Those games were fun and frantic, with the first one made easy to beat with unlimited continues, and the second one being much more challenging.

For the Game Boy entry into the series, they made a tighter, tougher, and shorter experience built solely around horizontal side scrolling in a single fortress. There are no wilderness areas nor vertically scrolling levels. 

Armed with just a sword and a flighty, pointy-toed jump, the player fights their way past all sorts of monsters and other defenses, picking up minor loot like gems, food, drink, keys, and extra lives. Every ten gems collected equals an extra life as well.

Keys unlock the chests one encounters, but the placement of these items is not usually connected. Grab keys when you see them, a chest will be around at some point. Chest items are either more gems, an extra life, the Shield of Protection (no idea what it did), and the most useful Boots of Jumping.

I always tried to get and keep those boots, which allow for farther jumps and soft landings. Luckily the chest loot is not random so one can note which chest has what reward.

Some levels have multiple paths through them and hidden areas discovered by exploration, including the classic “above the screen” areas as seen since Super Mario Bros. The healing items are relatively scarce so it’s best to not get hit at all.

Of course this was easier to achieve with the use of save states on my Analogue Pocket. The crisp screen and the elimination of blurring while scrolling helped as well. There were five sections to the game, with the first four broken into subsections 1.0, 1.1, etc. The final section was just one large area with multiple paths. 

I entered the final boss battle with Malkil unexpectedly but had six hearts and nine lives to burn as the battle does not stop upon death and regeneration. He fell after I sacrificed about three lives. 

The under appreciated Wizards & Warriors series was unique and challenging and I’m glad I got to play three of them. On the Game Boy, Wizards and Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear captures the style and gameplay of its NES brethren while presenting its own vibe as well.