So soo good I'm a fan!
I was "doing great"... I failed shortly after :)
So far 50%/780
the original game had a weird sense of "difficulty curve", it immediately starts off hard, yes there are later on 3 or 4 harder levels but the rest is basically average difficulty when you've played a bit.
But yes it is convenient to train on each level (and it wasn't possible in the original) maybe check your progress in the achievements, even just to improve total/average timings if beating the whole game seems too hard.
Thanks Alice, I was actually a bit hesitant to push on the aesthetics since the project started as a "raw" Intellivision/Atari graphics so yeah I've tried to keep the 3 games quite simple in gfx (with a little exception on the Pitfall background maybe) and then used the rest of spritesheet for the extra "Illustrative/cover" art. Thank you for playing!
High score today: 54760
reached 6th level, it's fundamentally impossible to beat lol
A detail I didn't notice in the first plays is when at higher stages the 'perimeter guy' goes after you in your version he is literally chasing you; in the original it was a little less of a nightmare and more controllable because he just "followed your steps".
Oh and I still suck at the hyppo stage 😅
Awesome remake! I'm a great fan of the original, played a lot on Mame as well recently. No surprise my first ever sample cart for Pico-8 (first steps learning pico's Lua) is a "trainer" of the pig bonus stage with increasing difficulty (Amidus on lexaloffle).
About the bonus stage I wasn't definitely prepared for the odd bonus Hyppo stage (not in the original) is it your own addition or was it in some other remake/ports?
Thanks a lot! Yes I tried to keep the in-game graphics as faithful as possible (for pico8's low-res) to the original arcade... then spent all the resources left for the menu screen (the original had just a wooden sign so I've tried to put the nice art of the actual cabinet). It's been very fun I admit!
Cool, I had missed this one from Taito.
So -curious about the original- I've played it on Mame as well and it appears to have some kind of hidden trick for your rocket to block alien lasers; at least no trace in the instructions/description. I've just noticed it in a YT longplay where the guy was stopping the shots somehow?!? And trying on Mame I see you can push up on contact: although 80% of the times it's stopped a couple frames but I'm still hit shortly after.
Glad to see others remaking oldies for Pico8 👌
So glad! I've probably spent more hours inspecting details of the original arcade than actual programming time. I've discovered tiny details I've never noticed in decades even small quirks and imperfections like: if you watch a gameplay video in slow-mo (or frame by frame) you'll notice the sprite animation of barrels rolls in the wrong direction in the original 😯
Due to Pico-8 limitations the game uses 60fps flicker for a variety of effects (eg. semi-trasparency, font antialias, colour blending to have colours like cyan/teal not in pico8 palette), but in the web version the browser and/or busy pc could skip several frames making it noticeable/annoying.
In that case you can turn the flicker OFF in the menu pressing Enter (you'll immediately see the blending effects disappear -the ladders will turn blue-, crispy font etc..).
Thanks for playing!
Nice, it's tiny, cute and colourful. I particularly love Processing Plant.
One thing I noticed is you use pixel collisions on blocks (keys, plants etc..) while the original -as opposed to pixel perfect collision on creatures- used box/block collisions on items. I keep missing keys lol
Glad you finished your port now because it was in my todo-list (I was considering 8x8 blocks and scrolling but tiny as you did is probably the best option).