Simplistic yet stellar!

The title is all rainbow colored, very nice

To Beat: Finish all levels 1-60 without continuing
Played: 6/3/21 – 6/29/21
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Lunar Pool Longplay

My instinct as a programmer is that a game like Lunar Pool would be challenging to program. It’s not super-fast action with parallax scrolling, screen-filling bosses, and DPCM sound effects, far from it, but there are just so many considerations with a game like this. The developers must allow dynamic speeds, angles, and collisions with friction on all of those objects at once with each other and the table. I’ve seen plenty of NES games lag up with only a few relatively simple sprites on the screen. I can’t imagine how one could smoothly handle all those interactions. Still, there were several developers that figured it out successfully. Lunar Pool was the first billiards game on the NES, and even though it is a simple game on the surface, I found this to be quite an impressive piece of software, and a fun game to boot.

Lunar Pool was developed by Compile, who are best known for both their scrolling shooter games and Puyo Puyo. The company was originally known as Programmers-3 Inc. until 1985. Lunar Pool was one of the first, if not the first, developed games under the Compile name. It was released in 1985, first on the PC-88 in June 1985, then on the Famicom in Japan in December 1985. There it was published by Pony Canyon. In October 1987, Lunar Pool came to the NES in North America, published by FCI. The PAL version was released way later in 1991. The game was also part of the Wii Virtual Console, released in North America in October 2007.

After starting at the title screen, press Start to get to the options menu. First choose the game type, either a one-player game, a two-player game, or a game against the computer, where you take turns to compete for score. Press Up or Down to select the round number. Lunar Pool has 60 tables to choose from. You can also adjust the level of friction with Left and Right. The default value is 32 but you can select any value within the range 0-255. With zero friction, balls will slide around forever, and with max friction they barely move at all. Once all is decided, press Start to begin the game.

It looks standard, but goes beyond that very quickly

The game kicks off with a standard looking pool table. Six numbered balls are arranged in the classic triangular layout. To start, use the D-pad to aim. The cursor moves in a circle centered around the cue ball. Press Right to rotate the cursor clockwise, and use Left to rotate counter-clockwise. Up moves the cursor away from the ball while Down brings the cursor back toward the cue ball, i.e., increasing and decreasing the radius, respectively. The angle is all that matters here; the position of the cursor is simply a visual aid to help line up faraway shots. The cursor movement is very granular and even changes its shape on every tiny adjustment so you can dial in the exact shot that you want. The power of the shot is determined by the power meter at the top-right that grows and shrinks on its own. Here you will have to time your shot and press the A button to get the desired power.

The goal here is to pocket all the balls to move on to the next stage. You can pocket them in any order you like. The Ball counter is for how many cue balls, or lives, you have. If the cue ball goes into the pocket, you lose a ball and the table resets to the state prior to the shot. You get up to three chances to pocket any ball, as shown by the Shot counter. If you fail to pocket a ball in three consecutive attempts, you also lose a ball. You earn an extra ball after clearing each table. If you can clear the whole table without missing a shot, you get a Perfect bonus of an extra ball on top of the extra ball you get for clearing the table.

Lunar Pool also has a Rate mechanic. You are rewarded for pocketing many balls in a row without missing. The Rate counter starts off at 1 and resets back to 1 on any missed shot. Pocketing a ball increases Rate by 1. If you can pocket two balls in one shot, your rate goes up by 1 for the first ball and by 2 for the second ball, 3 total. This scales up accordingly if you can pocket three or more at once. Keeping a high Rate counter has two benefits. Your score for pocketing each ball goes up as your Rate counter increases, acting as a sort multiplier. More importantly, if you can get up to a Rate of 20 or more, you earn an extra ball. Beyond that, you earn an extra ball for every multiple of 5 you reach beyond 20. A big streak across multiple tables can give you many extra balls to better manage the challenging tables ahead.

I had a streak going until here.

This is my first time beating Lunar Pool. This is a game that is fun to tinker with, and so I’ve played the first few levels several times over the years. I can’t recall if I had this game at all when I was younger or if this is something I got more interested in later. This is the kind of game that appears on multicarts so I know I’ve seen it that way quite a bit. This common game exists as both a 3-screw and a 5-screw cart where the 5-screw cart seems more common in my experience. It’s the form factor I have. This is an inexpensive cart selling for around $8 and you are pretty likely to find it in a lot for less money.

While this is a straightforward, simple game, there is a catch if you want to beat it. You must clear all 60 stages in a row without a Game Over. Any Game Over sends you back to the title screen, and from there you can continue the game from the level you lost. You could go through 1-60 that way, but it’s not quite good enough. There is a special ending screen that is shown after Stage 60 if you clear it all in one go. This special screen is what sets this game apart from an easy clear to a quite challenging one. This is where building up a good rate and a large stash of extra balls goes a long way toward managing this long experience.

A large part of the challenge is that the difficulty curve is all over the place. Some tables have a lot of angles, weird shapes, or tough ball placement. The pockets can have portions blocked off, and the worst is when only a quarter of a pocket is showing, blocked by the walls. It is very difficult to wedge a shot into that tiny area, and shot finesse is very important. Sometimes those challenging tables are tough to even get started and things can spiral out of control quickly. On the other hand, some stages were laughably easy. Some levels are retreads of previous levels, and one particular stage in the middle of the game has only one ball to sink, which can be routed easily. With 60 tables to clear, I had to take notes to keep track of outlier stages on both ends of the curve.

Shoutout to this level, easy clear!

My primary approach was to get off to as strong a start as possible. There were a few tables I tried my best to route out a perfect clear. The most important of these to me was Stage 3. The first stage isn’t all that bad to finish perfect even without a plan, and Stage 2 lined itself up to a natural order I didn’t have to plan for. Stage 3, however, is an X-shaped level with pockets tucked away where it seems impossible to handle in one go. Through lots of trial and error, I managed to come up with a plan that gave me a pretty good chance of getting a perfect clear. Stage 3 was the level that revealed to me that the power levels on the shots are more nuanced than the visual meter would appear. There are several in-game frames between when the icons light up on the power meter, and the actual power of a given shot seems to be frame dependent. That means you have to have precise timing within 1/60th of a second to dial in an exact shot power. This is different than the angles which you can take your time to set them and make them consistent every time. I could tell in Stage 3 particularly when I got the shot I wanted and when I was off just a touch. Carrying a perfect run into Stage 4 gave me a huge jumpstart and it was worth the effort.

I’ll admit this came a lot later in the process than it should have, but the most important factor for me beating this game was utilizing the built-in stage select. I know speedrunners use save states and other tools to practice levels and sections over and over. I don’t do that to beat NES games, even if it costs me extra time replaying learned levels over and over. But since stage select is built-in, I took full advantage of it with no reservations. I practiced difficult levels, I planned out opening shots, I routed out levels, and I identified easy tables to full clear. Finding the stretches in the game where I could build up a high Rate and get extra balls was so helpful. I credit the stage select for helping me finish this game.

These barely exposed pockets are very hard to use.

My winning run wasn’t anything special. I started off well with perfect clears in the first two stages, and I was only one ball off from the perfect Stage 3. I also got back-to-back perfect clears in Stages 5 and 6. Not my ideal start, but definitely good enough to keep it going. My rate maxed out at 30, and then I got it back up to 25 in the early game, just good enough for a couple additional extra balls. It turns out I didn’t really need them. The most important stretch of the run was through the 20’s, this is what made the run viable. I got 3 perfect tables and managed to raise my ball count from 19 to 25 during this stretch. The back half of the game went good enough. It became important to ignore consecutive shots and rate and just set up as many easy shots as possible. It was also important not to panic and take my time. I finished the final stage with 9 balls remaining for a comfortable first time clear. This game took me 2 hours to beat, almost exactly.

The current best speedrun of Lunar Pool any% was by Rabadoom with a time of 1:05:26, far and away the best time on the board. You can tell that they practiced a lot to get the time down. There’s plenty of mistakes in the run but it’s really the only way to play Lunar Pool, since there is only so much you can strategize for. My completion of the game is fast enough for second place on the leaderboard, so I will be submitting that. I haven’t submitted any speedruns in quite a long time so this is a nice bonus. The primary speedrun category for Lunar Pool only covers the first 5 stages with the top times coming in just under 3 minutes.

I really enjoyed my time with Lunar Pool. There’s something so appealing to me about a simple game that functions well, plays well, and is challenging enough to keep my interest. The graphics are clear, colorful, and concise. All tables have moon theming aligned with the name of the game, which also fits thematically with the adjustable friction. The music might be repetitive, but it fits the game and doesn’t become annoying to me. It might not be a fully featured billiards game on the NES, but I think it could be the most fun to play.

#180 – Lunar Pool

Two styles of gameplay collide in this legendary adventure!

A static title screen with some nice music!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat both the main game and the special mode
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 11/7/16 – 11/19/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
Video: The Guardian Legend Special Mode Longplay

In 2012, Mike Matei of Cinemassacre published a now well-known YouTube video listing his top 10 obscure NES gems. The Guardian Legend is the first game I have covered that made his list. Now I won’t tell you exactly where this slotted in on the top 10, but most of the games on that list became instantly more popular overnight, including The Guardian Legend. So the game has a lot of hype surrounding it now, but does it live up to it?

The Guardian Legend was developed by Compile. They are pretty well known for developing shoot-em-up games. The game was first released on the Famicom in February 1988. There it was named Guardic Gaiden and it was published by Irem. The Guardian Legend was released on the NES in April 1989 and published by Broderbund. The game was later released in Europe in 1990 published by Nintendo. The box and label art are unique among all three versions of the game.

Much to my surprise, my research revealed that The Guardian Legend is actually a sequel. There was a trio of games released by Compile on the MSX computer in Japan. The first game was Final Justice which released in 1985 and plays similarly to Galaga. The second is Guardic released in 1986. In this game, each level is a static screen with enemies to shoot. You go to the next stage by flying upward into a scrolling section where you can decide which path and level you want to take next. The third game is Blaster Burn from 1990 which is a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up. The Guardian Legend is the sequel of the middle game Guardic.

There’s a lot going on even in the very beginning.

The Guardian Legend is a shoot-em-up game comprised of vertically scrolling shoot-em-up sections and top-down adventure sections. You play as the Guardian who can transform between a humanoid form and a spaceship form. The goal of the game is to destroy the planet Naju which is filled with monsters and set on a collision course toward Earth. Your mission is to explore the surface of the planet to locate corridors that are buried deep inside the planet. These corridors contain switches that can activate the self-destruct sequence when all of them are set.

The game begins inside the first corridor. Here the Guardian assumes her spaceship form and you play a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up stage. After clearing the stage, the Guardian switches back to her humanoid form and then you explore the surface of the planet from a top-down perspective searching for the next corridor. The game format resembles The Legend of Zelda in that you explore an overworld while looking for dungeons you need to clear.

The controls are pretty much the same in both perspectives. Use the D-Pad to move the Guardian in eight directions. The B button fires the standard weapon. In the shoot-em-up sections you can only fire upward but in the top-down portions you can shoot in any direction. Hold down the B button for a quite generous auto-fire. The A button is used to fire secondary weapons. You can pause the game by pressing Start and you press Select to open up the subscreen.

Information overload!

There is a lot of information available on the subscreen. The top portion of the subscreen contains the same information shown when you are playing and it is comprised of three rows. The top row shows your current score, the number of power chips you currently have, the number of shots for your secondary weapon, and which secondary weapon you have equipped. The middle row contains your health bar. The bottom row shows which area you are located and the X and Y coordinates of where you are located in the overworld. All of that is just the top part of the subscreen!

The left side of the subscreen shows the map. You can see your current location highlighted as well as the location of any reachable corridor. The right side of the subscreen shows which keys you have, the maximum number of chips you can have, your attack and defense power, the power level of the currently selected subweapon, and how many chips it takes to fire the current subweapon. The bottom of the subscreen shows all of the subweapons you have. Use the cursor to select which subweapon you want to equip.

The power chips are very important to your survival. They are the ammunition for your subweapons. Each subweapon uses up a certain number of chips for each time you fire it and you cannot use your subweapons if you run out of chips. The other important mechanic is that the chips also influence the firepower of your normal weapon. When you reach certain chip amounts your weapon will power up, but spending chips and falling below that amount will cause your weapon to downgrade. There is a balancing act between using your other weapons while also maintaining enough chips in reserve to have a more useful normal weapon.

It’s a tiny swarm of overworld enemies.

There are a ton of upgrades and items that you will encounter in the game. The most important items for making progress are the keys. As you explore you will find black circles on the ground next to walls that have some kind of symbol written on them. If you hold the key that matches the symbol, then you can stand on the circle and teleport to the adjacent room. The keys are found in the corridors and they allow access to new areas of the map. Each new area hides more corridors.

You will also gather subweapons. There are twelve unique subweapons and once you have one you can switch to it anytime you want via the subscreen. If you collect the same subweapon again you can upgrade it to a more powerful form. Each subweapon has three distinct power levels. These get really strong later in the game but they cost more chips to deploy. The subweapons have all kinds of different effects and patterns and they are a lot of fun to use. You can get grenades, a laser sword, circular shots, homing shots, and so on. If one of the enemies or bosses is giving you a lot of trouble, it is probably because you are not using the best subweapon for the job. Experiment to see which one is most useful for your situation.

Some items give you other types of permanent upgrades. The Blue Lander is a little creature that will increase your maximum health, and the Red Lander increases the maximum amount of power chips. The gun item increases your attack power, and the shield item increases your defense power. The item that looks like four upward arrows increases the rate of fire for your normal weapon. You can also find an energy tank that fills up your health to your current maximum. It’s worth pointing out here that you can also upgrade your maximum health by reaching certain score thresholds.

Look, a weapon lying on the ground!

Other items are found by defeating enemies. Sometimes when you kill an enemy a little explosion cloud will appear on the ground for a little while leaving behind a power-up block. Shoot the block to reveal the item. You can find a heart that will restore some of your health. The blue orb gives you 20 power chips and a tiny bit of health, and a red orb restores 500 power chips and a little more health than the blue orb. You can also find full energy tanks but they are more uncommon.

There are quite a few ways to find the upgrades and items. On the surface you can find shops where you can exchange power chips for a weapon or upgrade. Some screens contain mini bosses that hold an upgrades. When you walk into one of these screens an alarm will sound and all the screen exits will be blocked off forming an arena for the fight. These can be challenging but the reward is worth it. Some screens contain a powerup freely for the taking although it takes some maneuvering around the map to find them.

There are ten different areas spread out across the map that branch off of the hub area. Each one has its own theme such as a water area and forest area. Each area contains two corridors and they are numbered based on the current area number. Area 1 contains both Corridor 1 and Corridor 11, for example. Corridors 1-10 are required for clearing the game and each one of them is blocked off from entry. There is some kind of puzzle you need to solve to open up the gate. Exploring the area and talking with some Blue Landers will yield the answer for how to open the gate and access the corridor. The remaining Corridors 11-20 are optional but you get upgrades from clearing them that you probably will want.

One of many huge boss sprites!

The corridor stages can pose a challenge. Often they are teeming with enemies and there can be a lot going on at one time. The scrolling speed varies from crawling to crazy fast which can add to the excitement. Each stage ends in a fight with a huge, detailed boss that takes a lot of firepower to defeat. As mentioned before, choosing the right subweapon is critical to taking out the boss successfully.

All throughout the map you will find rooms with Blue Landers that will give you a password to save your progress. The passwords are really complex, consisting of 32 characters of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The passwords do track all of the items you have acquired as well as your score, but the length and complexity is just too much. Thankfully in the smartphone era a simple picture works wonders for capturing it just right.

This was my first time playing through The Guardian Legend but I have quite a few random memories surrounding this game. Growing up it was one of those games I would often browse at the local video store but never rented. I ended up buying my first copy of the game for $5 during my honeymoon. A couple of years later I got big into NES collecting again and The Guardian Legend kept popping up for me. My local game store chain was slow to update their NES pricing and they sold it for $3 when it was at least a $10 game. I bought several copies of the game just to flip. (Yep, I’m one of those “evil” reseller types.) I even picked up a cheap copy on eBay a couple of years ago when I saw it. Then right before I started playing through the game for my blog, my grandmother came across a lot of NES stuff with yet another copy of The Guardian Legend. This one however was a nice condition complete in box copy that I am keeping!

Such colorful death bubbles!

It took me a little under two weeks to finish playing The Guardian Legend with my normal rate of playing. The game definitely has some meat to it with all the areas and corridors, but I managed to make progress at a good rate every time I played. I didn’t get stuck anywhere for too long and even the most difficult corridors only took a few attempts at most.

The Guardian Legend is extremely generous with powerups. The item drop rate isn’t terribly high, but there are so many enemies around to defeat that you will get powerups on constant rotation. The top-down segments, corridors, and even most boss fights provide you enough to keeping going as long as you are reasonably careful and employ smart subweapon usage. For this reason, I don’t think the game is that difficult overall, but there were a few tricky sections that caused me to give it a 4/10 difficulty rating. One of the recurring minibosses became a war of attrition every time I encountered it, and the final boss was pretty mean and took a few tries to beat. This is the kind of game where you consistently make progress, and you can keep attempting the tough parts until you get it right.

I already spoiled this a little bit, but in case you didn’t pick up on it or don’t want to know, now is the time to skip ahead to the next paragraph! Upon beating the game and sitting through the end credits, you are given a very short password “TGL.” You can use the password to play through a special mode of the game that consists only of the Corridor sections. The levels are identical to the regular game but the big change here is how you are awarded the powerups. After completing each corridor, you are taken to a special screen where you earn powerups for meeting specific score requirements. You can get as many as five powerups after each stage even if you score high enough to be awarded more. This mode shifts the focus on scoring as many points as you can. It is also more difficult than the regular game because the rollout of powerups is slower than in the normal mode. It’s a fun way to play through the game again and a fitting reward for beating the game.

The Guardian Legend handles many enemies pretty well.

There is a very good hack of the game called The Guardian Legend Secret Edition. This is a complete overhaul of the game containing a new overworld, new Corridor stages, new Corridor puzzles, and even some new bosses. The difficulty has also been cranked up quite a lot, but that is to be expected with a hack like this. I started playing through Secret Edition once I completed the game and I got about halfway through before I stopped playing. If you like The Guardian Legend then you will really like Secret Edition. I really need to get back to it and finish it for myself!

The Guardian Legend indeed lives up to the hype. This is a really good NES game that I enjoyed playing a lot. The game controls well, the graphics and music are really nice, the myriad of subweapons gives you a lot of variety and power, the boss fights are well made, and most importantly the game is simply fun to play. I certainly got hooked! The only negative in my mind is the long password system, but if that’s the only thing I can find wrong with the game then Compile did a whole lot more right. I recommended that you give this gem a try!

#37 – The Guardian Legend