I decided to try something different. Instead of wasting some time on a modern game, I thought I'd dig up one of the old classics I played back in the 1980s and see if I could beat it now.
My choice was
Auf Wiedersehen Monty, one of the better-known games in a series starring a
-clad burrower. This one was released in 1987 and is the fourth chapter in the story of Monty Mole, a video game character that's unique in that his creation stems from a real-life event of the time (the British Miner's Strike of 1984-1985). The first Monty game (
Wanted, Monty Mole) had him stealing a bucket of coal and escaping through his tunnels to keep his home warm through the winter, but ended with Monty getting arrested and sentenced to prison. The sequel (
Monty is Innocent) has his mate bust him out, and subsequent sequels dealt with Monty evading the law, first by getting out of Britain (
Monty on the Run) and then heading towards a more permament law-evading solution (
Auf Wiedersehen Monty). The final Monty Mole game (
Impossamole) is where the plot jumps the shark, so I'm not even gonna comment on that. There's also a covertape-exclusive game (
Moley Christmas) and a couple of recent fan-made games, so Monty isn't some obscenely obscure video game character, but still relatively unknown today.
Monty on the Run and Auf Wiedersehen Monty are by far the best-known games in the series, most probably due to the kick-ass tunes made for them by Rob Hubbard (both games) and Ben Daglish (only AWM). For anyone wanting to have a go at the entire series your best bet is to fire up a Sinclair Spectrum emulator, as that's the only platform all the Monty games appear on (even the fan-games). This would technically make Monty Mole the 'gaming mascot' of the Spectrum, as I'm not sure that any other video game character originating on the platform has as many games under their belt. (Sorry Horace.)
But back to the game. AWM, like most of the Monty games, is a 2D platformer with the game world split into screens (no scrolling) and involves Monty having to collect things and evade bizarre-looking baddies. In terms of size AWM is probably the biggest Monty game of them all, comprising almost 80 screens in total, arranged to give a rough map of mainland Europe. Monty starts the game in Gibraltar and must make his way to the Greek island of Montos, but first he must raise the cash to buy the island, and that's where things go pear-shaped. You see, almost all of the Monty Mole games are easy to get into, but monstrously difficult to beat. You start with six lives (with a further six available in-game) but you will not believe how easy it is to get killed in these games, especially by cheesy deaths like harmless-looking walls and the Crushers... every Monty player hates the Crushers.
Let me show you what the manual says about how to play the game:
Can you help Monty in his last fight for freedom? He must flee for his life across Europe, in an effort to raise enough money to buy the Greek island of Montos. On Montos Monty will at last escape extradition as no one else even knows of its existence.
Travel across the continent with our mole, 'acquiring' travellers cheques and any other valuables on your way. Could Monty make a few francs from fencing the Mona Lisa? Can our intrepid Mole repair his car in time to compete in the Grand Prix? The prize money could come in handy. The Mafia may help if he can avoid the 'heavy duty footwear'. Romance awaits Monty in "Pizza" in the form of 'Mole Fatale", the fair Juliet. Her heart begs to be captured by a daring Muscle Mole - is Monty her mole?
Can Monty tempt the palate of the German wine connoisseurs by delivering a very special bottle of Chateau Blanc from one of the finest vineyards in France? Collect the plane tickets at the airports to enable Monty to travel from one country to another. While in flight try to nibble the back of the other planes to increase your score.
When all the objects have been collected a complete island will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then and only then should you go to Montos as arriving earlier may seriously damage your chances of finishing the game.
The rest explains the controls and how to load the game. This is
all you have to go on. Finding out what item does what, which scenery items kill you, which baddies
don't kill you and figuring out how the airports work - that's all left up to Trial and Error. After having a few goes at the game I quickly realized I was way in over my head. So I did some online sleuthing. That took an entire evening. There are close to a dozen different maps out there for the game (with
this one being the most useful one) and several walkthroughs, but even then I had to combine information from several sources to find the info I needed - there is no Definitive Guide to this game out there.
What I learned was this:
# While each screen is generally pretty easy to complete (i.e. grabbing everything of value) there are a few stumper screens that can really eat up all those lives. Venice Italy is a good example, and one of the East Germany screens is another. Keep in mind that there's no inherent saving in games like these, and you can begin to understand the difficulty involved here.
# The worst part is figuring out whether a spot is safe to walk on or not. There is normal floors, electrified floors (stuns Monty temporarily but isn't lethal), trampoline floors (jump on these and an animated sequence has Monty reach high up), bouncy floors (Monty jumps straight up in the air on these), grappling floors (Monty walks upside-down on the bottom of these), slippery floors (Monty breakdances on these), crumbling walls, illusionary walls, floor spikes, walls that suck you into themselves (fatal) and walls that just plain kill you for no reason. Some of these hazards you can spot by their appearance, others not. Oh, and water is always fatal.
# If playing with an emulator, don't be afraid to use save-states. Really. Anything else is madness.
# In order to scrape together enough money to buy the island of Montos, you must collect ALL THE MONEY in the game. That means getting every single traveller's cheque and every special item, and delivering those special items to their respective locations. (This may be dependant upon which version of the game you play. I played the Amstrad CPC version, other versions may be more lenient on this.) To know whether you've collected enough money, there's an empty spot on the status screen at the start of the game. As you get more money, an image of an island starts to appear there. Only when the whole image has appeared are you supposed to go to Montos.
# The special items are the items mentioned in the vague instructions above. The Mona Lisa must be brought from France to Sicily to get a huge money boost from the mafia. The steering wheel in Sweden must be brought to Monaco, and there's a girl at the Leaning Tower of Pisa who could appreciate some flowers, but to get those you need to help out a drowning Dutchman first. Wine must be brought to Germany, bacon to Praag and a football to Italy, and then there's the broken cable car in Austria that must be fixed. There's plenty of back-and-forthing around in this game.
# Except that presents two extra problems. First, while the game world is laid out screen-by-screen, it's not all accesible via normal means. There's a divide between the eastern and western parts of the map (Iron Curtain, anyone?) and Sweden isn't even connected to the map. Here's where the airports come in. They're located closely to their real-life counterparts and act as teleporters, but they only take you from Point A to Point B (and almost always only one-way) so first players have to figure out all of their destinations. (Trial and Error strikes again.) Second, using an airport requires a plane ticket, and there's only a limited number of plane tickets in the game. This means players not only have to learn to overcome the obstacles of each and every screen, but also map out their route through the game, knowing which airports to take... and when.
# The above problems are further emboldened by the game's inventory. You can carry up to four items, but you have no control over the inventory. If you pick up an inventory item it stays there until it's used. This can and will lead to problems as picking up certain items must wait while you're trying to offload others, and this can mean using plane tickets that you didn't need to use. More than that, there are at least two airports that don't send you anywhere, they only eat up your plane ticket.
# All in all this makes AWM quite a tough game. After I did all my research on the game I had a few more tries, including one where I used a trainer so that I had infinite lives and baddies couldn't hurt me. It took me three hours to beat the game that way, and only because I ended up following a walkthrough to the letter to ensure I got everything. Even then I only had one plane ticket left over. This game doesn't pull any punches. If I'm gonna have another proper go at the game, I'll be playing a different version than the Amstrad.
# For reference, a speedrun exists of the game where it's beaten in 26 minutes. (By comparison Monty on the Run's speedrun is 12 minutes.) Now take a minute and think about all the playthrough attempts people must go through just to figure out what everything does in this game, then practicing how to beat every screen in the game, then managing to pull all of that off in a single playthrough, and you get the idea of how many dozens of hours people poured into this game. There's easily 20-30 hours of gameplay in there, probably more. This is how games were padded with gameplay in the 1980s.
# The game was originally sold for £8, which would be something like $10 before we account for inflation. The original release came with a poster and a badge, so there was considerable value in buying it before it went to a budget label, which cut out any and all such extras.
# One hidden secret I read about is the extra music in the game. At least it's supposed to be in the Spectrum and C-64 versions of the game, it's not in the Amstrad version. The main tune is playing non-stop during the entire game (to the point of insanity) but it can be turned off on the main menu (not on the Amstrad though
). If you do this the game will be very quiet, but it will play the national anthems of a nation when you cross their borders, courtesy of Rob Hubbard. So that's nice.
Overall, AWM is not a game for modern gamers. It requires work, research and careful planning to be beaten, but it also shows how far game design has come, and what is expected of a gamer nowadays. And yes, Monty on the Run is even harder than AWM, for a completely different reason. Maybe I'll have a go at that game and show you one of the cheesiest gameplay paddings I've ever seen.
All the complex foliage gets rendered to static. The only option that does work is SSAA via nvidia inspector, the most expensive form of AA. So it's either 'deal with the static' or 'measure your framerate in frames per minute'.
