Today's game is a non-stop action fest which sees you at the helm of a giant bipedal battle mech that has to destroy the lunar forces of the evil mastermind Zorloxx. This is Puzzle Shuffle:
Wait, my bad. It's not an action game at all; this is a sliding tile puzzle with pictures.
Here's a confession: I don't like sliding puzzles very much. Every time I try playing one, I find myself in a situation where I have to switch the position of two adjacent tiles, which takes me an inordinate number of moves to get right, and then I've accidentally destroyed parts of the puzzle that had already been correct.
Here's a second confession: I'm superficial enough that I find myself liking a game based on the presentation alone. And this one really delivers in that department. Just take a look at this excellent piece of pixel art:
Does that robot look familiar to anyone else?
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| Source: www.makexyz.com |
Yes, it's very much inspired by ED-209 from the 1987 movie RoboCop. The crime-riddled Detroit was replaced by what looks like the surface of a barren moon. Wherever this battle takes place, I hope they don't have stairs there, or the mechanical walker might find itself defeated in the most embarrassing way.
I recently watched RoboCop after I hadn't seen it for years, and I must say that movie still holds up. Especially the stop-motion effects used for ED-209 have so much character, it's a joy to see the robot move and (quite often) flail around.
But enough about that, back to the game at hand. Let's get this show started by pressing the fire button:
It's all very simple, really. You merely have to do what the computer just did, but in reverse order. Alternatively, if you don't have the photographic memory of a machine, you can try solving the puzzle the regular way by moving the pieces around and gradually pushing them into the correct sequence. To make things interesting, the game imposes a time limit of ten minutes.
Incidentally, in the above shuffle, seven tiles remained in the right position:
Not that this helps to solve the puzzle in any useful way. It is far easier to match tiles line by line instead of trying to keep the initially correct tiles untouched.
Since the empty tile has to end up in the top left corner, I'll start completing the puzzle from the bottom up.
The bottom row was easy to do, with a lot of free maneuvering space to shuffle tiles around. The pixel artist responsible for this piece, Peter van Driel, was nice enough to sign his creation with his initials (PvD) which are easy to spot. That's obviously the tile that belongs in the bottom left corner. Overall, the biggest challenge is to recognize the graphical elements and remember where they were in the unscrambled picture. I made a screenshot of the puzzle before it got shuffled, and now I'm using it as a reference. I did a similar thing in 1990 where I perused the screenshot printed on the Golden Disk 64 magazine's back cover.
The second row wasn't very hard either. The last two tiles on the left side ended up swapped, and I lost time trying to switch their positions. Still, I managed to complete half of the puzzle with eight minutes to spare.
For the upper half, I had to revise my strategy, as the available space wouldn't allow me to complete the puzzle line by line. Instead, I tried to complete both remaining lines simultaneously, starting from the right side where the gray moon is located:
As you can see, I struggled a while getting the last remaining pieces of the moon in place, since they were swapped. Situations like these usually cause me to fruitlessly move tiles around in circles until I stumble on the solution.
And that's the first puzzle done. The scoring works as follows: A completed puzzle rewards 1000 points and the remaining seconds are added as a bonus. I finished with 409 seconds left, thus I got a score of 1409.
Puzzle #2 resorts to the classic princess and dragon motif from Greek mythology. Judging by the architecture in the background, the scene is indeed taking place in Ancient Greece. I don't remember any Greek myths about blue pterodactyls, so I must assume we're looking at a dragon with a more pronounced prehistoric ancestry.
This might just be incidental, but the color composition of this picture lines up with the previous one quite well which helps to identify the puzzles pieces once they're all scrambled up.
 Puzzle Shuffle runs in multicolor bitmap mode. In this screen mode, each square tile of 8x8 pixels (or rather 4x8, since the pixels are elongated) can contain four different colors. Three can be picked individually for each tile, and the fourth (background) color is shared by all tiles (unless some raster trickery is used). I've added a grid to the dragon/princess picture to make the tiling more obvious: This work of pixel art is a great showcase how C64 multicolor graphics require clever positioning of elements in order to work well with the color restrictions.  An obvious example is the top right stone pillar whose shape perfectly fills out the tiles. It can use all three shades of gray (plus black) without interfering with the warm colors used by the sky surrounding it. The artist decided to use gray for the princess' hair as well, most likely to avoid any potential color clash with the pillar behind it. The sky uses a total of seven colors, but they change gradually with some halftone dithering in between. That way, there are never more than three different colors in one tile. The blue dragon, despite its sprawling shape, is also pretty well contained within the grid. There are only a few tiles at the edges where the dragon's skin was turned from blue to brown or gray, mostly where its head meets the sky.Sometimes it's not possible to fix tiles with color clashes because all four colors are already in use. In the case of this dragon, all of the discolored pixels can be cleaned up without violating any bitmap multicolor rules. That's just nitpicking on my part, though, as the difference is hardly noticeable. In fact, if it weren't for this article, I never would've spotted any of these "faulty" tiles. |
As with the first, the second puzzle has to be solved within a time limit of ten minutes. Since the number of tiles remains the same for all puzzles, the perceived difficulty mainly comes from the picture and how easy it is to tell the jumbled tiles apart. I'll just use a screenshot again as a reference and repeat my strategy from the first puzzle.
This one took me a bit longer, but I still had more than five minutes left. I love the flashy animation that smoothly transitions from one puzzle to the next. As simple as the game is, the sleek presentation and the attention to details lends the experience a lot of character. As a contrast, let me show you a contemporary sliding tile game for Windows 3.1:
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| Puzzle 8, Pocket-Sized Software, 1991 |
Not exactly a feast for the senses, is it? Admittedly, I'm a bit unfair here. Most Windows games at the time were made to blend in with your average spreadsheet program. Still, this bare-bones presentation feels like a step backward compared to what a much older and slower machine could achieve.
At this point I also have to mention Puzzle Shuffle's music, because a considerable part of my enjoyment comes from the game's audio. There is only one track that plays on loop endlessly, but it's such a great tune that I gladly listen to it several times in a row. It was composed by Reyn Ouwehand who is well-known for his work on System 3 titles such as The Last Ninja 3 or Flimbo's Quest. Here's a video which also includes gameplay footage where I complete half of the first level:
Back to my current game where I've just reached the next level:
Puzzle #3 depicts what may at first glance look like an epic battle between good and evil. In reality, it shows an overconfident apprentice mage who just summoned a lesser demon without knowing how to control it, and now he is desperately trying to fend off his creation with the handful of weak beginner spells he knows. I just noticed that he looks a bit like Rufus from Helden which I played previously on this blog. Rufus also had a knack for making foolish decisions and throwing flimsy lightning spells at enemies.
Nothing changes gameplay-wise, so I'll just solve this one the same way I did the others and skip directly to the next puzzle:
Oh, hello there.
I honestly don't know if this aquatic creature is purely made up or based on a real animal. The clinical style in which it is drawn reminds me of illustrations in natural science books which makes me think this is an actual lifeform that can (or used to) be found in our waters.
The change from one artist to the next is a bit jarring, at least to me. Not only does the drawing style change, but the subject matter takes a noticeable leap as well. Instead of science fiction and fantasy imagery, we're suddenly in what feels like a biology class. Also, compared to the previous pictures, this one has a larger amount of empty space which may end up making the puzzle harder to solve.
That's not to say that I don't like the image on its own. It's not necessary for all puzzles to portray dramatic scenes, and I'm quite intrigued by that swimming salamander.
Right, on to the next and final puzzle:
I might not know what that previous water dweller is supposed to be, but I recognize a frog when I see one. And this specimen is one of the cutest pixel-amphibians I've come across in a C64 game. This is also the first time I've ever seen this picture, as I never got this far in Puzzle Shuffle.
I can see why this image was chosen as the final puzzle. The wooden log consists of very similar-looking details that cause a lot of tiles to appear almost identical. The puzzle is quite a challenge to solve, even with my screenshot "cheat".
In a shuffled state, the number of gray tiles with diagonal lines is rather disconcerting. Without the completed picture as a reference, I probably would have quit at this point.
With the last puzzle solved, Puzzle Shuffle fades out the music and declares the game to be over. Since my score is good enough, a triumphant melody emerges and I am allowed to enter my name into the high score table.
The high scores are not saved to the disk, so my victory is a fleeting one.
I wanted to know what happens if I take too long to complete a puzzle. As pleasant as the game presents itself, it gets outright mean if the player fails:
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| "Shame!" |
Gee, I'm sorry for being such a disgrace to the noble ranks of puzzles solvers.
CONCLUSION
Gameplay-wise, Puzzle Shuffle doesn't win any innovation prizes with its ancient sliding puzzle mechanic. However, what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in presentation.
The graphics are colorful with some nicely animated details, and all the puzzles are well-drawn. The shift in style from one artist to the next feels a bit jarring to me, but that impression mainly comes from the fact that Peter van Driel's pictures appear in the first three puzzles and only afterward is there a switch to another artist.
I also want to point out that Puzzle Shuffle does not use sprites in any way, which is remarkably rare outside of text adventures. The only other completely spriteless game I've so far encountered on this blog was Shift.
The cheerful music by Reyn Ouwehand supports the positive feel of the game. Even though it is the only track that plays while you are solving a puzzle, it doesn't become grating even after ten loops.
A time limit of ten minutes may sound pretty generous, but the later puzzles can be quite difficult if you are still unfamiliar with the images you are supposed to reconstruct. When I played the game on my original C64, I don't think I ever got past the second puzzle. Playing with the completed picture as a reference lessened the challenge considerably, and I found the experience more enjoyable that way. I'd rather concentrate on getting the tiles to their correct positions and not having to worry about identifying parts of a picture I only got to see once. In a way, I transformed the gameplay to make it more similar to sliding puzzles that have numbers on their tiles instead of a picture. I got the best of both worlds; I knew where each tile was supposed to go, and I still got a nice picture as a reward in the end.
In today's gaming world, this kind of puzzle usually shows up as an out-of-place distraction that brings the regular gameplay to a grinding halt, much to the player's dismay. As a game on its own, wrapped in a nice package, it works much better. I enjoyed Puzzle Shuffle enough to find a new appreciation for this age-old brainteaser.
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