From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

The Adventures of Lolo Series - Making a Push for My Heart
How a series of games I once foolishly dismissed became an obsession.

In several of my previous Memory Bank chronicles, I spent a lot of time talking about how, for most of my childhood, I had a strong propensity to dismiss or ignore any game whose theme or subject-matter wasn't instantly recognizable to me. I made it clear that I had an incredibly narrow set of interests, and I didn't want anything to do with games whose content didn't fit within them.

The sad truth is that I very rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of my personal bubble.

If, for example, I was flipping through the pages of that month's issue of Nintendo Power, I was likely doing so with the express purpose of seeking out information pertaining only to anticipated releases and games with which I was already intimately familiar. Nothing else mattered to me. I simply blew past all other games and stories.

Oh, there were certainly times when something new would catch my attention. I'd stop to read about an upcoming release if the pages dedicated to it contained eye-catching hand-drawn images of monsters or screenshots depicting a game whose visuals were too awesome to ignore, sure, but generally I'd dedicate all of my focus to the safe and the familiar.

And then there was that other type of material--the type I would not only casually disregard but go to great lengths to avoid. And I'm talking specifically about games whose visuals were "overly cute-looking." I shunned them because I, like every other insecure kid, was programmed by certain societal forces to instantly dismiss games that projected excessive amounts of cuteness. I believed that a game's being overly cute was an indicator that it was inherently low in quality and made for toddlers who didn't know any better.

I mean, I was perfectly fine with "cartoony" visuals, like the type seen in Capcom's Disney games, and usually had a great fondness for them, but when a game would take things to the extreme--when its every character was childishly drawn and a sickening combination of super-deformed, big-eyed, smiley and bubbly--I'd instantly reject it. Upon seeing it, I'd sneer and then quickly flip to the next page. "Why should I bother reading about a game that was obviously made for stupid 4-year-olds?" I'd think to myself in the following moment.

And whenever I talk about this subject, one particular game series immediately comes to mind. This series, to me, was the symbol of "pandering cuteness." It was a series whose imagery never failed to trigger the type of disgusted reaction I described above. And thus it was a series that I was content to forever avoid.

Its name was Adventures of Lolo.

Oh, Adventures of Lolo. How I despised that series and its games. I couldn't stand to look at any of them. The mere sight of their big colorful logos and their sickeningly cute character depictions was always enough to make me roll my eyes and then proceed to speedily flip past all of the pages that were providing them coverage.

What bothered me more than anything was that the Adventures of Lolo games were so ubiquitous. Nintendo Power was constantly providing them some type of coverage. Every issue, it seemed, had something to say about Lolo and his games. And all I could do was wonder why. "Who the hell would want to play a game in which you control a cutesy blue ball with massive eyes?" I'd think to myself in a dismissive tone every time I'd see a rendering of the character. I certainly didn't. That's why I avoided the Lolo series. I had no desire to play its games or even know what they were about. They just didn't deserve that level of attention.

"These games aren't and never will be worth my time!" I was confident in saying.

Well, it turns out that I was horribly wrong. And that's why I'm here to today. I'm coming before you to say that (a) my actions were terribly misguided, (b) my opinions were ill-formed, and (c) my failure to give the Adventures of Lolo a fair chance is indeed yet another entry on my long list of game-related regrets. I'll even go as far to say that my spurning of Adventures of Lolo is one of the great tragedies of my gaming past!

Though, the great thing about this medium, I've learned, is that there are no expiration dates. Great games don't go anywhere. They're always there for you to discover (or rediscover). And they never lose their ability to capture your heart and change your life.

That's what I found out when I got into the Adventure of Lolo series.

It all started one boring day during the summer of 2001.

At the time, I was loading up random NES ROM files from a compilation CD that I had made for my brother a year earlier (that's how I'd usually keep myself entertained on boring days). And at one point, while scrolling through the file folder, I came across a familiar-sounding game title--one that I hadn't seen or heard since the early 90s. It belonged to the much-reviled Adventures of Lolo. On a whim, I decided to load it up and give it a quick sampling and to do so only for curiosity's sake. You know--to find out why it was such a stupid game and why I was right to avoid it for all those years.

"I'll play one or two of its dumb stages and then quickly move on to some other A-titled game that's bound to be more engaging," I thought to myself.

When the game's first stage came into view, I observed that it contained two heart icons and that a large, inexplicably smiley green snake was blocking the path to one of them. And all I could think was "Why am I doing this? Am I really going to waste my time on this game?" As I examined the stage's environment, I could only shake my head and snicker cynically.

So I went over and grabbed the unguarded heart. It boosted my "egg" counter to 2, though I didn't know what that meant. Though, I learned, after I hit the action button and fired off a projectile into a tree, that I'd been supplied bullets. And I knew just what to do with them: use them to kill the snake.

So I restarted the stage, obtained two bullets, and then fired one of them at the snake. That's when I discovered a few things: (1) Bullets didn't actually kill the snake, no; instead they functioned to encase it in an egg. (2) After "eggifying" (as I termed the process) the snake, you could push it out of the way or use a second bullet to blast away the egg and thus temporarily remove the snake from the room. And (3) if you chose to blast away the snake, it would respawn in its original location a couple of seconds later, so you only had a limited amount of time to grab the second heart and escape the from the room's upper-middle portion; if you didn't escape in time, you'd wind up trapped, and you'd have to use the self-destruct function to restart the stage. So pushing eggs away was the obviously the better option.

After I obtained both hearts, the room's treasure chest popped open and revealed a crystal. When I procured it, the room's door opened up. And then I promptly made my exit.

"This is kid's stuff," I thought.

So I entered the second room and, thinking myself to already be a Lolo master, proceeded to confidently rush toward and the obtain the heart icons and then head for the open treasure chest. That's when something unexpected happened: As I was leaving the room's upper-left corner and heading toward the chest, I was suddenly attacked and killed by one of the the previously dormant pink dragon creatures. It blasted me with a fireball when I passed beneath it! "Well, that was mean!" I thought after jumping back in surprise.

At the time, I wasn't paying much attention to what was going on around me, so I didn't even notice that the dragons had sprung to life after I obtained the hearts. But now I understood what was going on: After you obtained all of a room's hearts, its enemies' behavior would change in some way. So I had to make sure not to grab the top-left heart last; if I did pick it up last, I now knew, I'd be forced to pass beneath the down-facing dragon, and consequently I'd eat a giant fireball. Also, I intuited, it made sense to push the movable green block in front the bottom-left-positioned dragon and thus prevent it from being able to spew fireballs; doing so would remove a potential threat.

"No problem!" I thought. "This cute little game can't stump me!"

(Also, on that same day, I solved Blue's Clues at least a full minute before Steve did, so you better recognize the skill.)

Though, as I was playing through the next couple of stages, it became clear to me that the was a whole lot more depth to Adventures of Lolo than I thought, and suddenly my interest began to pique. So I decided to play at least one more stage. And after clearing it, I decided to play through another. And then another. And before long, I'd cleared the entire first floor. At that moment, I felt inspired to play through at least one more floor. And, well, "one more floor" ballooned into five or six floors, and I couldn't deny that I was fully invested in this game!

I'd been a big fan of puzzle games for basically my entire life. I loved all forms of them: block-falling games like Tetris and Dr. Mario; jigsaw-style games like Daedalian Opus; action-puzzlers like Wrecking Crew, Solomon's Key and Donkey Kong '94; and point-and-click adventures like Maniac Mansion and Shadowgate. But I'd never played a game quite like Adventures of Lolo; it was truly something different--something uniquely compelling. I didn't even know what to call it (I settled on "block-pushing game"). Though, I knew that I loved it, whatever it was.

After I completed Adventures of Lolo, I could say, without hesitation, that it was one of the most brilliantly designed games I'd ever played. It was a top-tier puzzler if ever I'd seen one, and I was so glad to have discovered it. I never imagined that such a cutesy, simple-looking game could contain some of the best, most-compelling puzzle-action I'd ever experienced. And all I could do was look at Adventures of Lolo and ask, "Now where have you been all my life?"

Oh, that's right: It was there from day one, and I'd see it every time I flipped through an issue of Nintendo Power. But of course I would always readily snub it in favor of reading about Fred Savage's (or whoever's) favorite video games or some 30-input title-screen code that I probably wouldn't be able to properly input (I'm lookin' at you, Solstice's 90-lives code!).

But yeah--I was astonished by what HAL Laboratory was able to accomplish here. Its developers created a humble amount of content--a mere eight enemy types, a handful of items (the occasionally appearing hammer, ladder and arrow-switching items), and just three types of terrain--and used it to design dozens of cleverly constructed, amazingly creative puzzle rooms. And you had to work to solve most of them. You had to examine them, sometimes for hours, and while doing so plan your actions and consider the consequences of each one; you had to put together an order of operations and then skillfully carry out each step in the sequence.

There were so many instances in which I had to make crucial decisions like, "Do I ride the egg directly over to the island, or do I push it into the water and then proceed to run around to the right side, skirt past the Don Medusa, cut through the Armadillo pack, and then board the egg as it's floating upward?" And one wrong move would doom me; one mistimed block-push, one extra half-step, or one missed shot would be enough to render a puzzle room unclearable. That's the level of skill and precision Adventure of Lolo required. It was such a tightly designed game.

To truly master Adventures of Lolo, though, I had to do some experimentation and learn some advanced tactics, like using a single green block to obstruct or box in a pair of enemies, and walking across the edges of heart icons (or "heart framers," as the manual calls them) so that you could avoid obtaining the icons and thus use them as shields.

Honestly, I wasn't sure that such tactics were legitimate, and I'd feel as though I was cheating whenever I used them. "Does this stage's design actually demand that I use these seemingly-game-breaking tactics?" I'd wonder whenever I'd avoid Medusa fire by passing through the center portions of two adjacent heart icons. "Or is it that that I'm a dunce who's been so broken by my repeated failures that I have to resort to using cheap tricks in order to clear this room?" I could never tell.

And that music, man--that infectiously cheerful 30-second tune that was looping endlessly and drilling itself into my brain. I didn't know if it was helping me to become more invested in the action or if it was driving me insane. Really, it might have been both.

The only thing I could say for certain was that Adventures of Lolo had busted my brain and done so in the most wonderful of ways. I enjoyed every second of the experience and every moment of the struggle. I loved everything about it. More than anything, though, I wanted more of what it offered. I needed more Adventure of Lolo action in my life, and I needed it immediately. And I knew exactly where to find it.

As far as I was aware, Adventures of Lolo 2 was the second of only two Adventures of Lolo sequels. "That's probably all there is to the series," I thought. "It's simply another one of those NES-exclusive trilogies."

I'd never seen Adventures of Lolo 2 in action, so I didn't know what to expect from it. All I could do was guess as to what would be "new" about it. "How does it expand upon or improve the formula?" I wondered during the intervening period.

Though, as I was playing through the game's first few rooms, I couldn't help but think that something was amiss. From what I could see, there didn't seem to be anything "new" about Adventures of Lolo 2. In fact, it was structurally and graphically identical to the first game! I assumed that the situation would change as I advanced, and eventually the game would begin to introduce genuinely new elements, but I was wrong. It never happened; at no point did the game introduce a new enemy, item or environment type. Save for a slight change in texturing in its final castle rooms and a stupidly simple final-boss fight, there were absolutely none in the way of substantial changes or additions.

"That's an odd way to approach making a sequel," I thought. "Even the designers of the largely copy-and-pasted Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 thought to at least change up the palette a bit!"

But you know what? I was fine with that approach. I was surprised by it, yes, but not disappointed. Really, I didn't mind that the game reused all of Adventures of Lolo's assets and that, again, there was only a single stage theme--another infectiously cheerful tune that functioned to slowly drive me mad. The only thing I desired was more of what the Adventures of Lolo offered, and that's exactly what Adventures of Lolo 2 provided me. (And its puzzle rooms were generally more challenging, and that, to me, was substance enough.)

Even then, its additional 50-stages-worth of mind-bending puzzles wasn't nearly enough to satisfy my craving. I desperately needed more, and I knew where to turn to get it!

And yep--Adventures of Lolo III was virtually the same damn game. Well, mostly.

To its credit, HAL Labs' designers mixed things up a bit and introduced some new elements: They created a fully traversable Zelda II-style overworld map that neatly partitioned the game's room-sets. They included a second playable character: Lolo's girlfriend Lala, who was previously relegated to damsel in distress (though, she was simply a palette-swap and thus had no unique abilities). They drew up some new textures (finally). They threw in a new blowfish-type enemy called Moby (it was exclusive to underwater stages, and its job was to compromise your movements by annoyingly sucking you inward whenever you entered into its line of sight). And they implemented actual boss battles.

The boss battles were rather simple (you faced off against giant-sized versions of minor enemies, each of which had a very predictable pattern), sure, but they were still interesting; that was more than I could say for Lolo 2's final battle, during which the boss, King Egger, just stood there and did nothing.

None of these additions (outside of Moby) did anything to change or alter the series' basic gameplay formula, no, but, well, I still didn't care! I went in desiring more of that tried-and-tested, addictively fun Lolo action, and, once again, I got exactly what I was looking for.

The biggest difference was that Adventure of Lolo III's later puzzle rooms were super-challenging, and sometimes it took me hours to clear just one of them. And, really, I wouldn't have had it any other way. Those rooms were ingenuously designed, and enjoyed each moment that I spent with them. I loved how they tested my intellect and problem-solving abilities. I relished the challenge of solving their puzzles.

And by the time I completed Adventures of Lolo III, I was a hardcore Lolo-lover. Adventures of Lolo had already become one of my all-time-favorite video-game series. I considered it to be one of the puzzle genre's absolute best.

And still I wanted more of it.

So I played through all three of its games again! And then multiple times after that! And each time, I derived a huge amount of enjoyment from my experiences.

Though, for as much fun as those three games were, they still weren't able to satisfy my craving. They couldn't, honestly, because what I truly desired were some new challenges, and none of them were able to offer me that.

So I took to the Internet and its collection of search engines to find out more about the series--to see if there was anything that I'd missed. And what I discovered surprised the hell out of me: The Adventures of Lolo games were actually part of a larger series called "Eggerland"--a name with which I wasn't at all familiar. I was also shocked to learn that the series began its life on MSX computers way back in 1985! That was a whole four years before Adventures of Lolo hit the NES!

To me, someone who was a fan of multiple Konami NES game series, this all sounded very familiar.

Excited by this discovery, I spent the next few hours desperately searching every MSX-focused site I could find for ROMs of the two games: Eggerland Mystery, the series' progenitor, and Eggerland Mystery 2. (Back then, in the Internet's Wild West era, finding ROMs was a far greater challenge because so many sites that claimed to have them actually didn't, and the rest of the sites were simply running scams.)

And after an exhaustive effort, I was finally able to locate copies of and download both games. And thereafter, I wasted no time in trying to unravel their "mysteries."

I started, of course, with Eggerland Mystery.

I knew that it was an old game, yeah, but even then, I wasn't expecting it to be so noticeably primitive-looking (much more so than the NES games) and so unpolished. Its rooms had simple black backgrounds, its object and character sprites had a rudimentary look to them, its music was choppy, and its action moved at a near-glacial pace. It was as barebones a Lolo game as you could get.

Yet, still, it very much played like an Adventures of Lolo game, and that's really all that mattered to me. "So what if it moves slowly and has annoyingly ringy music," I thought to myself. "As long as it gives me some new puzzles and some new challenges, I'll be happy!"

And for the most part, Eggerland Mystery gave me what I was looking for. Sure--quite a few of its rooms were already familiar to me because I'd seen them in the Adventures of Lolo games (HAL's designers had a habit of reusing old content), but that didn't bother me because it also contained plenty of uniquely designed rooms. We're talkin' at least 80 exclusive rooms (out of 105). And besides: I couldn't accuse Eggerland Mystery of "recycling content" when it was the series' first game. It was the Adventures of Lolo games, rather, that should have been docked points for recycling!

And I couldn't deny that Eggerland Mystery's primitive visual and aural qualities had incredible charm to them. They exuded that wonderfully fundamental- and experimental-feeling vibe that so typically emanated from old computer games (I'm talking about a time in history when PC games had their own identities and thus unmistakable visual and aural qualities). And for that reason, I loved how Eggerland Mystery felt--even in the moments when its trudgingly slow speed was making me want to scratch my face off.

After I completed Eggerland Mystery, I quickly moved on to its sequel: Eggerland Mystery 2.

And let me tell you, man: I was completely blown away by this game! Going in, I was expecting that Eggerland Mystery 2 was going to be another simple stage-by-stage puzzle game and that it was going to contain many of the same puzzle rooms I'd already cleared in other Eggerland-series games. But what I got, instead, was something excitingly different: a uniquely structured Eggerland game that could be best described as Adventures of Lolo meets the The Legend of Zelda.

In Eggerland Mystery 2, the world, itself, was a puzzle. It was comprised of 100 rooms arranged in a 10x10 grid, and your goal was to open it via puzzle-solving and then explore it and solve its mysteries. Most rooms had two or three exit points, so you'd always have the option to choose between multiple paths. Though, there were a few limitations: Some rooms couldn't be cleared from certain entry points, and other rooms couldn't be cleared without the use of special items (most of which were well-hidden).

So Eggerland Mystery 2's world wasn't exactly freely explorable, no, but, still, it had a "continuous" feel that did so much to generate a wonderful air of "adventure" (the type of air that was ironically missing from the series games that had the word adventure in their titles).

I played through Eggerland Mystery 2 over the course of a few quiet summer days, in an that span of time, I had the most engaging of video-game experiences (in fact, my play-through of the game represents one of my best post-teen-adulthood nostalgic video-game memories). It was, quite simply, an incredibly inventive, ingeniously designed puzzle game, and I had an amazing time with it. It was one of my new all-time-favorites.

I loved, also, how Eggerland Mystery 2 felt. It was a deeply alluring game, and it possessed that quality because there really was a lot of mystery surrounding it. And a big part of that mystery derived from the fact that there was so little information available about it (remember that we're talking about the Internet's early years). It had such a lost-treasure feel to it, and my having access to it made me feel as though I were part of an exclusive club of people who possessed hidden knowledge. That sense of private engagement and our suburb's quiet atmosphere, which was augmented by its calming symphony of bird- and cricket-chirps, combined to create a relaxing, quietly magical puzzle-solving environment. And what resulted were a series of well-remembered gaming sessions.

Though, completing Eggerland Mystery 2 proved to be difficult because parts of it were quite arcane. And I'm talking specifically about its "special" puzzle rooms, all of which existed outside of the overworld. Entrances to these rooms were hidden within regular overworld-map rooms, and you'd know that such an entrance was present when a question mark appeared in the HUD's item space. The problem was that uncovering these entrances required the use of obscure operations and tactics that, much like the hidden rooms, existed well outside the understood Eggerland ruleset; it required the use of mechanics whose existence was never communicated to you in any way--not in the game nor in the manual.

Here's an example: To uncover room 5E's hidden entrance, you had to push up against a sleeping Leeper ten times. How would you ever know to do such a thing? I don't know. But if you weren't aware that "pushing up against enemies" was a necessary mechanic, you were screwed. The only way you'd ever discover such a mechanic was to stumble upon it after spending an eternity exhausting every possibility.

That's what I kept running up against.

Some of these hidden-entrance puzzles had me so utterly stumped that I had no choice but to exhaustively search the Internet for solutions. I was always lucky enough to find the information I needed, yeah, though none of it ever came from an Eggerland-related FAQ file or guide because, apparently, no such document existed. Rather, my ultra-specific word-searches (those like "Eggerland 2" + "MSX" + "Question Mark" + "Leepers") turned up only ancient, forgotten message boards on which people (mostly bored housewives and older PC enthusiasts who had played the game years earlier) had casually talked about Eggerland Mystery 2 and its most arcane puzzles. So whenever I'd read these threads, I'd always feel as though I was acquiring top-secret knowledge. That's how scarce information was.

And I considered all of that search activity to be an essential part of my Eggerland Mystery 2 experience. Back then, that was how you beat arcane computer games.

The only parts of Eggerland Mystery 2 I disliked were its agonizingly plodding rafting-based puzzle rooms, which forced you to watch Lolo sail around scripted routes at near-glacial speeds. The raft moved so slowly that getting from one room to the next, or even one island to the next, could literally take minutes.

What was worse was that you could only escape these watery rooms by locating their correct exit currents. This was more of a challenge than it should have been because the designers, who apparently thought it was funny to waste players' time, decided to include multiple fake exit currents; and if you guessed incorrectly and chose to ride one of these, instead, you'd have to spend up to an entire minute watching Lolo sail over to a dead end and subsequently sink to his death. And the absolute worst part was that dying in a raft room sent you back not to its entry point, no, but instead to the previous room's entry point! So then you'd have to make an achingly long trip across a room you already completed!

"What in God's name were they thinking with this?!" I'd say in an exasperated tone every time the game did that to me.

Old games, man. How they love to torture you.

Unfortunate nautical issues aside, Eggerland Mystery 2 was a tremendously fun puzzle game, and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent with it. Yet again, the Eggerland series had provided me a top-tier puzzler--one of the best I'd ever played.

At this point, I was obsessed with the Eggerland series, and I had a deep desire to know what other secrets it held. Luckily for me, the Internet, right around this time, was starting to boom, and thus information on old games was becoming more readily available. So when I did some further research, I learned a mind-blowing fact: Whereas the US got three Adventure of Lolo games, Japan only got two, and our parts 2 and 3 were actually Japan's parts 1 and 2! The first Adventures of Lolo, it turned out, was nothing more than a best-of compilation comprised of stages taken directly from the MSX and Famicom Eggerland games; it was released here as a "test." (I guess we passed!)

The two shared Lolo games were altogether similar, the page in question stated, though apparently the Famicom versions' puzzle rooms were arranged differently, and both of the Famicom versions contained a small number of uniquely designed rooms.

Though, their having just a "small number of uniquely designed rooms" was enough for me to have major interest in them, so I wasted no time in seeking them out. And in the next two days, I played through and beat both of them.

And I wasn't done there. I still wanted more. So I decided that if there was an Adventures of Lolo/Eggerland game on any platform anywhere, I was going to hunt it down and then play it!

Soon after, I discovered that there a Japan-exclusive Game Boy version of Adventures of Lolo. I immediately sought it out and downloaded it.

Aside from its having a weird amusement-park theme, Game Boy Lolo was a genuine Adventures of Lolo game. Though, one thing about it was strikingly different: its compromised resolution. As Game Boy developers were sometimes apt to do, HAL Labs decided to retain the scale of the NES games' characters and objects and wound up creating a predictably-cramped-feeling game. Its stages were only half the size of the NES games' stages, and consequently there wasn't as much happening in each of them. And, naturally, because the Game Boy struggled to render more than three or four large sprites at a time, the game was plagued by slowdown.

Even then, though, the designers were able to use some ingenuity and construct many in the way of creatively designed, fun-to-solve puzzle rooms. So Game Boy Adventures of Lolo was definitely worth playing.

It turned out, though, that Game Boy Adventures of Lolo wasn't as "Japan-exclusive" as I thought. I later learned that a reworked version of it was released in Europe sometime in 1995. But apparently the only thing that was reworked was the theme. Now, rather, the game was about Lolo and Lala performing a musical!

"Well, that's a pointless change!" I thought to myself when I read that.

I was planning on skipping it, but I changed my mind when I read on some other site that, in actuality, the European version contained dozens of never-before-seen puzzle rooms (in addition to all of the Japanese version's puzzle rooms).

To me, that was very exciting news. By that point in time, I was tired of playing through the same ol' recycled puzzle rooms. I wanted to see some new ones, even if they were of the smaller-in-scale variety.

And yeah--the European version contained a ton of new puzzle rooms, and thus it provided me more for than a few day's worth of memorable puzzle-solving fun. It was yet another great "block-pushing game." Its sprite-flickering and slowdown issues were a nuisance, sure, but they were sufficiently counteracted by the classic Game Boy's nostalgia-inducing, evocative visual and aural qualities, which, as always, were able to distract me from the negative aspects and do so by keeping me in a constant state of wonderment. (Oh, the power of Game Boy!)

HAL Labs did such a fine job with Game Boy Lolo that I came away wishing that it had produced more Adventures of Lolo games for the platform. Had there been additional Lolo games, I would have been all over them!

Though, because I knew that there were only two such games, I made sure to savor each one of them. And because I did, I have fond memories of the time I spent with them.

And it turned out that there were still more Lolo games! Somehow I'd missed a few console entries (probably because there was a lot of overlap in the games' titles, and thus I assumed that similarly titled games were merely ports).

There were three such games, and they were spread across the Famicom and the Famicom Disk System. They were (a) the plainly titled Eggerland, (b) Eggerland: Souzouhe no Tabidachi (Departure to Creation), and (c) Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Revival of Labyrinth). And, according to what I was reading, each was styled after Eggerland Mystery 2 for the MSX! This information was so exciting to me that I immediately sought out and downloaded all three games!

Disappointingly, all three turned out to be compilation-type games (almost all of their puzzle rooms were taken from the MSX and earlier Famicom games). Though, because they had explorable-overworld elements, I was interested in playing through them, anyway, just to see how the designers went about stitching together all of the familiar rooms--rooms that were originally designed to be standalone.

But to be honest, really, I was so consumed by the power of Lolo that I was willing to play through any game that had Adventures of Lolo or Eggerland in its title!

By then, the transformation had been completed, and I was now a block-pushing, heart-collecting fiend. The Adventures of Lolo series, which I once foolishly shunned, was now among my all-time-favorites. I had an extreme love for it. I couldn't get enough of it. And it was all because of the events that took place on that fateful day in 2001.

Sadly, however, it seemed that my journey of discovery had come to an end. From what the information was telling me, I'd seen everything there was to see. There were no other Adventures of Lolo games. And, well, I was really bummed about that.

There were plenty of Lolo games for me to revisit, yeah, and maybe one of them might have felt "new" because I hadn't played it in a while and thus forgot the solutions to its puzzles, but, really, none of that would have worked to satisfy my hunger. I wanted something new.

Unfortunately, though, there were no more Lolo games to be discovered.

Or so I thought.

Well, it turned out that the information I'd been seeing wasn't up to date because, at that point in time, archaeological efforts hadn't yet been completed, and the Eggerland series, I was thrilled to learn, had one last surprise for me.

The newly discovered information revealed that HAL Labs dabbled in PC development during the mid-90s-to-early-2000s period, and its final creations for the platform were two Windows 95-compatible Eggerland-series games titled Eggerland for Windows 95 and Revival! Eggerland.

I was flabbergasted by this news.

"Wait, what?!" I said in reaction. "I thought HAL Labs was owned by Nintendo! What was the company doing making games for the PC?!"

Of course, there was a confusing backstory, and it had something to do with two separate entities sharing the same name (in this case, HAL Laboratory, Inc. and HAL Corporation) and having rights to different licenses. You know how that stuff goes.

Which entity created which product wasn't an issue for me, no. I didn't care about any of that. I just wanted to play the two games!

The available screenshots, though they were both blurry and warped, revealed that Eggerland for Windows 95 and Revival! Eggerland weren't quick-and-dirty ports, no, but instead uniquely crafted Eggerland games that were made with PC specifications in mind. They had high-resolution graphics and, according to the information, modern features like level-sharing and modability!

I needed these games in my life. So I began to search for them.

It was a long search, I tell you. I faced great trouble along the way. I endured many browser crashes and computer-freezes. But eventually I found copies of "both" games. And I say "both" because, in reality, the two games comprised a single product, and that product carried the name Revival! Eggerland.

The deal was that Revival! Eggerland contained two map packs: The first was the earlier-released Eggerland for Windows 95, and the second was the newer Revival! Eggerland, which you could swap in by manipulating a certain data file. The former was your standard compilation-type Lolo pack whereas Revival! was comprised of genuinely new puzzle rooms; it also contained some new elements: new terrain types, viewable water currents, and a new block-type--a silver block whose pointed head redirected shots at 90-degree angles (so now I finally had a way to eggify those terrifying Medusas and Don Medusas)!

Early on, though, I didn't know about the file-swapping part, so I wound up playing the default Eggerland for Windows 95 pack. And needless to say, I was pretty disappointed with it.

"Where are all of those unique elements I saw in the screenshots?" I kept wondering.

I looked to the Internet for answers.

And as I was searching through yet another in the way of obscure, long-since-abandoned message boards, I came across a thread that explained everything: There was a second map pack, and in order to load it up, you had to go into the setup file and type "Eggland1" in the file path (like, obviously).

Naturally Revival! was the much-superior game. I simply loved it. I spent quite a few cool, quiet summer nights gleefully solving its cleverly designed puzzles and exploring its lively, colorful world. The only downer was that I never got to hear its stage-theme music; switching it on wasn't an option because doing so would cause the game to crash the moment the action came into view (really, the game was unstable in general and would crash randomly because of incompatibilities with Windows XP's color and screen settings). Though, I was able to live with the absence of music because Revival!'s other aspects were so wonderfully immersive and could make me forget that there was no aural accompaniment.

Revival! was a real hidden gem.

And, memorably, its campaign culminated with one of the most unexpectedly wacky encounters in Eggerland-series history (and certainly in video-game history, too): a boss battle that played out like a Street Fighter II match! That's right: I had to best the main villain, King Egger, in a best-two-out-of-three side-scrolling kung-fu fight! Inexplicably, he was overpowered as hell, so to beat him, I had to resort to using the unsavory tactic of exploiting AI deficiencies to get him in a position in which he was trapped in the corner and thus unable to defend against flying kicks.

It wasn't the most amazingly designed boss fight, no, but it gave me a good laugh, and it served as a splendid capper to a long, fulfilling Adventures of Lolo journey that had now reached its ultimate end. I could now say that I'd discovered and beaten every Adventure of Lolo game in existence.

But I certainly wasn't done with the series, no. In the following weeks and months, I frequently returned to its games and continued to have great fun with them. At that time in my life, when I was under a tremendous amount of stress, the Lolo games were much-needed comfort food. Spending nights within the comfy confines of Lolo's cheerful world did so much to help me to get through that very tough period.

I was grateful to Lolo, too, for how he introduced me to the wonderful world of Sokoban-style games (not "block-pushing games," as I kept referring to them). Because of him, I was able to discover terrific games like Fire n' Ice, Mole Mania, Catrap and Boxxle, all of which quickly found their way onto my list of favorite puzzle games.

So yeah--that little blue fellow, whose image I once reviled, managed to enrich my life in many ways.

And he's still enriching it. I'm still deriving great enjoyment from his games. Every once in a while, I load up a random Adventures of Lolo game and spend a couple of hours playing it and relishing its fun, fulfilling puzzle action. And every time I play a Lolo game, I'm reminded that the hunger still exists--that I deeply desire for this series to make its grand return.

So come on, Nintendo. Do me a favor and bring back that big-eyed blue ball. Whip me up a brand new Adventures of Lolo game. Give new life to one of the best puzzle-game series in existence.

I'm starving for more Lolo action, Nintendo. So please--give me what I crave.

Do one thing for me:

Feed. Me. More.