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Just a note before I begin: much of Hoi is impossible to decipher, even with the help of screenshots. Although I will try my best to relate my own experiences with the game, seeking out an ADF and physically playing it yourself is the better substitute.
"Let's Play!"
Back in the early nineties Commodore was already struggling to keep afloat, thanks in part to the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, which ultimately kept the Amiga from reaching the potential of a true gaming platform. While Sega was releasing Sonic back in '91, "Team Hoi" put together this little ditty for the home computer. Although lost in the shuffle upon its first release, the advantage of the AGA chipset, as well as Team Hoi's recent expo appearances, have turned the once overlooked title into a cultural artifact, inspiring demo artists and recent European game designers alike. How does it measure up as a GAME, though? Let's play!
The game has no plot worth mentioning but only briefly: a load of nonsense about your woman being nicked. You play as Hoi, a green lizard beast best described as the Chris to Yoshi's Kevin Farley, and you decide her cooking was good enough that you justify scouring the land to rescue her. After a pleasant (and if you only have 512K of memory, kindly optional) intro sequence where Hoi runs around the screen in a daze Eric Schwartz-style, a quick-loading disk swap and a few introductory screens, including a strangely-isometric level select screen, you begin the game standing outside your house: a giant boot. So far, so good: for a platformer to load this quickly on your run-of-the-mill A500 and run this smooth was a rarity, so merit points for that.
You'll notice too that the colors are assaultingly ... plentiful; so much so that you'd be hard-pressed comparing its palette to a demo running with AGA a few years later (more on that later). Also, Hoi controls smoothly and the jumping is precise. Apart from some unnecessarily-funky graphics obviously meant to show off the developer's prowess then anything, we're still going strong. The lack of a bouncy set of sound effects is sadly missed, but the music is appropriately upbeat, although looped to Hell, and when you die your heart will skip a beat from the kaleidoscope effect and the REALLY upsetting ditty they composed. I want a platformer to make me feel happy while I play it, not make me want to kill myself when my own character dies.
Hoi only has five levels, and its playability issues are best described within the confines of only the first. There is no difficulty setting, generally a bad sign with early-90s platformers that the developer will rack up the challenge to mask a short game, and you would be right, except for one point: for a game with only five levels, each stage is staggeringly HUGE! Sure, they're strictly linear with very little breathing room to wander and collect some goodies but what's there is massive beyond belief. The first level alone I clocked just under an hour to complete: Shadow of the Beast 2 takes 45-minutes to FINISH. The other problem, which is a blessing the more you consider, is the collision detection. Hoi has no weapons, and the game isn't a console clone where enemies are easily dispatched by jumping on them: EVERYTHING in the game can and WILL kill you, from moving platforms, to pixelated-explosions, to a 2-screen fall (that's right, you cannot fall more then 2-screens in height or you will die on whichever platform you land on). Since every character in the game is meticulously outlined in black the collision detection is some of the best you may see, but you are cursed by pixel-perfect timing required for leap-of-faith jumps to timed enemies that HUNT YOU DOWN. The blessing, however, and that turns Hoi into a goldmine for retrospection, is that the enemies are vulnerable to everything you are, including large falls and background dangers. Since most living enemies in the game follow you it's possible to kill 50% of them simply by using stealth and luring them into traps. The issue with this is the small view-distance, impacting the leap-of-faith jumps to falling down a hole only to land on top of an enemy that just happened to be walking there at that time.
But is it playable? I'm a stickler for difficult games, and sometimes Hoi can get a little ridiculous, but by no means does that mean I don't recommend it to those inclined. Hoi is less a game and more of an artifact from a bygone era. Ignoring the game itself for a moment, from a technical standpoint alone it's a miracle what they were able to pull off here (and remember that in 1991 anything more then 16 colors on-screen was awe-inspiring). A few years down the road Team Hoi released remixed versions of the first three levels for the AGA chipset before they were quietly hushed aside while the new publishing houses tried to emulate Doom, and although their later demo work seemed to come back to Hoi (it was their only video game release to-date) it's pretty obvious the game's influence on maybe not console gaming, but computer gaming abroad, and their willingness to reach a new audience with the remixed versions is commendable. The game itself, however, is a schizophrenic diversion that can either be played as stealthy as Splinter Cell (maybe that's going too far) or as straightforward as any of the other platformers available. The realism factor (not going as far as calling it a dinosaur simulator) is definitely up there and as you proceed through the game the subtle gameplay niches you notice really make for a fulfilling time well-spent.
Its worth briefly touching on the other four levels in the game: level 2 takes place at a construction site, and is probably the best-designed stage in the game, with fewer leaps-of-faith and more run-and-gunning timed enemies, if you're keen on that. Level 3 is a side-scrolling shooter where you don a jetpack blasting sprites straight out of Arkanoid. It feels more like an excuse for variety then to streamline the stages together cohesively; not so great, and far too long considering there isn't much variety in the enemies. Level 4 straightens up with some underwater parts and the lush use of a green palate above-water for the graphical-minded but anyone who found the underwater stages of Sonic difficult will be tearing their hair out every time the "air" dial runs out (apparently there are two unlockable "bonus rounds" hidden in this level as well but I have yet to find them).
These are the four main stages and can be accessed from the level select screen as each consecutive one is unlocked. If you're willful, you can go back and try to collect the "diamonds" for a better high-score, but in this type of game the score is more of a gimmick then anything. Once Level 4 is completed though, and after scarily-delayed disk-accessing, Hoi automatically boots Level 5 ... the level that the manual ITSELF recommends you DO NOT play and QUIT the game if you are prone to epileptic seizures (patting yourself on the back that you've made it this far, however). It's difficult to describe, and I only perchanced on it through a trainer copy of the game: you have to keep guiding Hoi right while the level crumbles beneath him, and if you're too slow the crumbling ground catches up to you and you fall through the stage and have to restart. Oh, but not right away: the game teases you with a "waiting room" sequence with some of the most stomach-wrenching music ever committed to the Amiga. Once you hit the trigger switch, though, the game flips into overdrive: for almost 5-minutes, non-stop, with your pause button and slow-motion key deactivated by the game, you have to run right, avoiding the crumbling floor, AS WELL AS bad guys that are disguised into the acid-inspired demo background and platforms that are indistinguishable from each other. And just to tease you, the game is explicit in telling you that you have unlimited lives. It's RIGHT THERE in plain English. I know it seems like I've spent a LONG time discussing this one segment of a 6-hour game but it is a masterpiece: a gloriously-depraved and contemptuous disaster of a level of maniac-proportions that could ONLY have come from the minds of European programmers with a long history of drug and alcohol addiction. It's frustrating, it's fun, and most of all, it's SCARY! I recommend getting ahold of a trainer copy to just play this one stage if you can't be bothered with the rest of them, but if you DO make it this far, turn up the sound, turn off the lights, and don't play for too long or you'll ruin your eyes! And then, when you finally beat it, you get a coda sequence that only early-90s Amiga games could deliver. A fitting end.
Not much left to epilogue. Now in my twenties I grew up on the Amiga as both a workstation for writing and my primary computer for gaming, and in all my travels not one game has inspired as much distaste or as much respect as Hoi. It's a rollicking ride if you're willing to pay the boatman: those conditioned to new games and tutorials and the easily frustrated it's difficult to recommend, but to anyone keen on a little piece of forgotten history, press play.
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Reviewed by
daViincii on August 9, 2009
Read 1686 times. |
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For 1991, Hoi's 64-color palette is lush and the sprites are simple and drawn well, despite the absence of any static background art. Funky demo graphics give the game's seizure warning due merit.
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No SFX. From the length of the levels each section's individual tune can either become grating or disturbing over time but otherwise is orchestrated well.
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Maddeningly addictive despite a complete contempt for the player. The apocalypse of Level 5 is worth the price of admission alone.
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| If you have the patience of a saint, and possibly a trainer copy, Hoi is a must one-time play. Otherwise, it's hard to recommend if only for its difficulty. |
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