Plok

[Codiekitty]

Tonight I made it to what I think is the third to final stage and game overed. I think I'll talk about it now.

Plok is a side-scrolling platformer for the SNES. It starts out easy enough but man, it gets nasty after the flashback at Legacy Island.

As hideous as the sticker art is, it's definitely one of the best looking games I've seen in a while; it looks at least as good as Yoshi's Island. Okay, Plok himself looks a little dippy (he looks like what you'd get of you mashed Orko with a Pac-Man ghost). But the scenery is colorful, sometimes cartoony and but often more detailed with colors, and the backgrounds look like paintings. There's also this gorgeous detail with the spider boss. After you hit him twice he creates a web (you can actually get in a third it before he does it, it's just that the second hit triggers this phase) in the middle of the screen that's rainbow colored and spins. It almost looks more like a Ferris wheel than a spider web.

The music is odd. It's usually good, often bombastic, but other parts are kind of noodly. Not offensive or irritating, just kind of uninspired. The boss theme comes to mind, which starts off with this menacing cackle layered with some clashing, then some spooky "Oooh"ing, then the percussion kicks in, then finally the main song... and even though it's still catchy it kind of bumbly. Occasionally that cackle from the beginning repeats.

It's got a sense of humor, and even though I've read several of the gags at least five times they still make me smile or giggle.

My one complaint? This game needed a password system. From beginning to end, this game probably takes two hours to complete.

Heh, I went to paste my signature, but this was on my clipboard:



Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Luigiman7]

^ funny luigi.

[Codiekitty]

Okay, I honestly have not played this since I made this topic; I've just been too busy with a couple of school assignments to really do more than toy around with Sega Genesis Collection. Now that I've mired through that (the school stuff, not SGC), I'm hoping to give this another go tonight.

Also, I listened to an SPC set, and the laugh in the boss theme only repeats once, and it's at about that point where the song just loses is.


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Codiekitty]

I know nobody cares about this game, but I wanted to take a look at the graphics. I'm going to have to cut this post into more than one, because VGF only allows ten images a post.

I guess I could understand why somebody wouldn't be too blown away by the graphics if all they played was the Cotton Island segment, because the forgrounds on them all look the same. It's also an unimpressive green tarp with some basic shading over a monotonous brown color:

Level 1


Level 7


ZNES lets me peel away graphic layers, so let's take a look at the backgrounds for each level:









Not only does the sun set and the colors change for every stage, but you can see objects in the background (like the mountain, the castle in the lake, and the little shrine thing and island that appears in the fifth picture) move as your perspective changes. It's amazing.


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Codiekitty]

You can also see the colors change on the overworld:







(If you must know, the rest of the sentence on the last one is "...know what I'll do")

Then we meet the first boss, or bosses, Bobbins Bros.



Yeah, they're pretty ugly, and quite frankly the one on the sticker is probably THE reason I passed up one of the factory sealed copies of this game Gamestop had when I first visited one. But at least they have color, and I just love how they enter the arena:




Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Codiekitty]

After we beat the Bobbins Bros we make our way back to Akrillic, where we start getting textured ground:



And more gorgeous backgrounds:



There's also some strange details in the game. The fifth Cotton Island stage has some giant sewing needles jammed into the ground:



The Creepy Crag stage has a giant clothing button in the ground where you start the level.

And the game just gets more and more amazing looking, with mountains that seem to disappear into the sky, the creepy yet colorful Spooky Forest, the vibrantly colored and patterned Penkino bosses, the Womack Spider's Ferris Web, and much more. The Fleapit's foreground also looks mostly the same in all the Fleapit stages, but it's smashed tile instead of flat green plastic. I really don't know if I'd be able to provide screens of the later moments of the game - it's extremely awkard for me to play Plok on an emulator.

And now some humorous moments:


I don't know why this one cracks me up so much.





Also, the background of that first image:




Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Lilac DownDeep]

Well... the beckgrounds are very colorful and cartoony, but I loves the scenes and the backgrounds. They look real nice.

[hferg]

on the "Fab day" one.... is it just me or does that statue look a little like eggman?

[Frumie]

^If Dr. Eggman was a midget and had a bell for a body, yes, yes it would look like him.

[Codiekitty]

That's Grandpappy Plok.


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Codiekitty]

I BEAT PLOK AND I'M ANNOUNCING IT TO THE WORLD!

The final boss is no Zizzy Balloobba, but she still puts up a pretty mean fight.

Excuse me while I go do the Daffy Duck "WOOHOOWOOHOOWOOHOO" routine.

However, since I just updated the "of the Moments" yesterday (or maybe the day before), I'll hold out on updating it for about a week.

Why, lookie what I just remembered.

Some things I guess I should comment on:

if you threw all your arms and legs, you would begin to slide down the slope towards the bottom of the screen, which invariably means death for any video game character.

I'm not sure what this means, because there is not one bottomless pit in the entire game. Any level where you can fall off the stage has water at the bottom, which when you land in will shoot you back out and take off a nice chunk of your health.

the part i didnt like was that there was this clothes hanger is you touched it it would take a piece of your body parts but then again i dont remember much i was only 7 when i played the game

those were annoying.

There's clotheshangers in the game, but they don't take your body parts when you touch them. If you hit certain targets, your limb is transported to one of these clotheshangers rather than returned to you, and you have to get them back from the hangers (this makes for one very interesting level where you have to do the first half without your legs)


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!