Games That Time Forgot: Adventures of Lolo
Sometimes being a blue ball with eyes and feet has its benefits.
That's more or less the premise behind the underground, quirky puzzler, Adventures of Lolo.
Besides being a blue ball, Lolo is also out to save his girlfriend, cleverly named Lala (a pink ball with eyes and feet), from the evil King Egger.
This really is a timeless game. It's comprised of a simple, top-down viewpoint where you work your way through room after room, with a theme to each stage. So you'll go through rooms 1-1, 1-2, etc. before completing a stage as you work your way through Egger's castle.
You can, obviously, occasionally shoot things and turn them into eggs that can serve all kinds of different purposes, among other adventurous actions. Sometimes you begin a new room and as soon as you move it triggers your instant death due to some booby-trap element.
That's part of the joy of this game: You really don't know what's going to happen next, but you know that you'll be able to figure it out with enough trial and error. And, damn it, you're going to get Lala back.
Adventures of Lolo also has one of my all-time favorite features from old games: A passcode as a form of saving your progress.
As in the NES version of Punch-Out!!, there was a time when you found yourself scrambling for a pen and paper to write down a seemingly random string of numbers and letters. This method, of course, broke the dam wide open for gamers to cheat. Luckily, this was before the Internet and the only other way I could get my hands on any codes was if one of my older brothers happened to leave them scrawled somewhere.
There were some sequels, but I honestly never played them. Maybe I'll change that soon.
Adventures of Lolo will bring back all those vintage gaming feels, but it will also still legitimately challenge you — not to mention eat up your day before you realize what's even happened.
That might be because the American version was actually a conglomeration of rooms from the Japanese Eggerland series, as noted by Wikipedia.
Whatever the reason, Adventures of Lolo deserves another go 'round.
Besides, Lala needs you.
