The other game I’ve been playing in this collection is Quinty (Mendel Palace in America), Game Freak’s first ever game.
I’ve played other non-Pokémon Game Freak games before, but since those games came long after the first Pokémon it was hard to really connect any dots to those late 90s games that made the company so successful.
But Quinty certainly bears fingerprints all over of the original, smaller team that went on to make Pokémon. The art and spritework is undeniably Ken Sugimori’s, the soundtrack is undeniably Junichi Masuda’s style, and there are echoes of Pokémon in the character movement style chosen by designer Satoshi Tajiri, and the eight palaces (gyms?) of traps that feature.
The game itself is deceptively simple in true arcade fashion. You walk around a tiled room, dispatching baddies by sliding them off into walls. That’s easier said than done - press the A button on a tile in front of you and off they go sliding. But only if they are standing on that tile in the first place. Each world contains different enemy types - some which are infuriating to deal with - and each level has a different combination of tiles and special tile with bonus effects.
It’s a challenging game and the designers know this, since it gives you unlimited continues and you’re free to switch worlds whenever you like, your progress saved between them. I’ve so far dispatched six of the eight bosses, but I’m completely stumped on the latter stages of the remaining two worlds.