From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Quick Impressions: "High Seas Havoc" (Genesis)

Here we have another game that I discovered while I was bouncing between Twitch channels: High Seas Havoc for the Sega Genesis.

It's really something.

I came across it, originally, about two years ago when I watched a streamer named LittleMIXER play through its final stages, and I saw more of it two weeks ago when I watched a fellow named Captain Jax play it over the course of a few days. And even though I could clearly see, in each instance, that the game was causing the streamer to suffer immensely, I simply couldn't help but be drawn to it.

It just looked interesting to me! It was one of the most visually impressive 16-bit games I'd ever seen, it had amazingly stirring music, and it contained the type of challenging platform action that appealed to me and consequently activated my competitive spirit and caused me to think to myself, "I wonder if I can beat this game and do so faster than these other cats."

So I decided to play it for myself!

I planned to start doing so on March 9th, and I chose that particular date because it fell within the period in which Jax was taking a break from the game. Playing it at that point, I knew, would allow me to experience the game's final one-third in a largely-spoiler-free manner (I did watch him play through the game's 5th and 6th worlds, but I only did so passively).

The other reason that I was interested in playing High Seas Havoc was because it was made by Data East, which has, in recent years, become one of my favorite 80s- and 90s-era game developers. In that time, I've been greatly enjoying the company's games and especially those like Joe & Mac, Sly Spy, Congo's Caper, BurgerTime Deluxe and the stellar Bloody Wolf (which I've written about on this blog), and simultaneously I've been looking to delve deeper into the company's library and discover more of its best games.

And this convergence of interests made playing High Seas Havoc a no-brainer for me.

I knew exactly what I was getting into when I decided to play it. I understood that I was in for a serious trial and that I was going to experience a lot of stress and aggravation during my play-through. But I was fine with that because I trusted my sense that I would, nevertheless, enjoy the game and come away from it with an even greater appreciation for its visuals and music.

So did my experience with High Seas Havoc turn out like I thought it would? Or were the naysayers correct when they said that it was a bad game that would leave me feeling extremely sour?

Well, allow me to provide you the answer.

 Let me start out by stating the obvious and acknowledging that High Seas Havoc is, as some of you may already know, another in a long line of Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired mascot platformers.

It shamelessly lifts Sonic's visual style and presentation. It has the same type of level design (multi-path stages, a lot of environments formed from sloped platforms, and large numbers of springs and breakable item-containers) and world structure (zones that are, in large part, divided into two separate acts, the second of which concludes with a boss battle). And it contains enemies that are highly reminiscent of Sonic's (it has, for instance, a mini-monoplane-riding fox that operates identically to the latter's Buzzers). (And in homage to its inspiration, I guess, it also has a giant stalking fireball enemy that looks remarkably similar to Super Sonic!)

By doing all of this, it's able to successfully recreate the feel of the Sonic games, certainly, but at the same time, it's not able to do what's necessary to replicate their gameplay style, which, more than anything, makes them what they are. This is to say that it, like many of the other Sonic imitators (Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, Jazz Jackrabbit, Superfrog, and such), fails to incorporate level-design schemes that are actually welcoming of speedy gameplay.

To put it simply: In High Seas Havoc, speed kills.

The game, by its nature, invites you to go fast, but if you actually do so, you'll have a miserable time of it. You'll constantly drop into spike and death pits, collide with enemies and objects right as they enter into view, and put yourself in positions in which you necessarily have to make series of blind jumps.

(It doesn't help that you're not able to shift the camera downward to see what's beneath you. The result is that you sometimes have to blindly drop down and hope that there's solid ground waiting for you.)

Can't shift the screen downward to look, result is that sometimes you have to take leaps of faith. Other Sonic imitators do this to their great detriment, and it's bad to see here.

The problem isn't so much that your field of vision is limited as much as is that you don't possess the means necessary to survive a reckless-abandon approach to gameplay. You don't have a way to instantly replenish your health after you take damage. When you run into an enemy or a spiky obstacle, you can't simply retrieve a bunch of dislodged rings and then happily continue speeding along, no; all you can do, rather, is take a heavy amount of damage and become filled with the sense that charging ahead again is probably a really bad idea.

Ultimately you come to the conclusion that it's better to exercise caution and advance slowly. And that's what you wind up doing most of the time.

And as a result, High Seas Havoc takes on the character not of a speedy Sonic-like platformer but instead a moderately paced, largely traditional platformer.

So it's not what it was meant to be.

And in truth, I'm happy that it worked out that way. Because I feel that High Seas Havoc works very well as a traditional platformer. It's better as a game that invites you to calculate your movements and act with high precision.

In my view, the game's failing to replicate Sonic's gameplay style actually turns out to be one of its greatest strengths. It helps it to put some distance between itself and the Sonic games (and all of the Sonic imitators, for that matter) and develop a pleasantly divergent style of play.

So you could say that it accidentally stumbled its way into a category in which it's a more natural fit.

 The fact is that High Seas Havoc only hurts itself when it sticks too close to Sonic the Hedgehog's template. That's especially evident when you consider its controls.

High Seas Havoc, you see, also uses a single input for its hero's separate action moves, which is something that it absolutely should have refrained from doing. Because the problem is that its hero, Havoc, unlike Sonic, has an aerial attack, and it's difficult to become acclimated and habituated to pressing the jump button a second time to execute an attack if you've been playing traditionally input-mapped action games for most of your life (and if you're playing this game, you probably have).

So what happens, for the first hour or two, is that your brain's wires get crossed up whenever it comes time to execute an aerial attack. Your natural instinct clashes with the game's demand for adaptation, and consequently you freeze up as you desperately try to remember the location of a dedicated attack button that doesn't exist. And then you wind up doing nothing and taking damage.

You can remedy this by this problem by using two buttons (A and B, for instance) to simulate a dual-input scheme (by treating one of them as an attack button even though it isn't), sure, but you shouldn't have to do such a thing. There should be a dedicated attack button, and there would have been had the development team not boxed itself in by rigidly sticking with the idea that its game needed to copy everything that Sonic the Hedgehog did.

Havoc's jump, like Mario's and Sonic's, also functions as a stomp-attack, and you can likewise use it to spring off of enemies. And you can increase the height of the bounce by continuing to hold down the jump button after you press it.

But this causes a problem, too, because your natural instinct will be to press the jump button right before you make contact with the enemy, which is what you've been doing in platformers for your entire life. If you do so, though, you'll execute a flying kick rather than a stomp, and you'll wind up hurting yourself because the flying kick's hitbox doesn't extend downward, and thus the move can't be used to attack underlying enemies. What'll happen, rather, is that you'll take damage and get knocked back.

I speak from experience when I say that it's really difficult to train yourself to stop trying to spring off of enemies by pressing the button as you come into contact with them. I never became fully habituated to the game's required method, and even hours later, I was still slipping up frequently and trying to bounce off of enemies in the traditional manner.

When you combine this with the aforementioned issue, you create the conditions for some serious confusion. I'm serious: There will be many instances in which you're in the air and enemies are coming at you from both above and below and you simply can't remember how to properly engage with any of them. And then you'll get frustrated and annoyed.

Had the development team made the smarter choice to instead use a traditional control-scheme, none of these problems would exist.

The good news, though, is that the game's jumping controls, in terms of aerial movement, feel very nice. They're appropriately tight and highly responsive, and they allow you platform long distances comfortably and with great precision.

You'll always land where you want to, and you'll never have to worry about sliding off of platforms.

 But of course, I can't continue to ignore the huge elephant in the room and not talk about the game's most infamous quality: its extremely high level of difficulty.

The fact of the matter is that High Seas Havoc is one of the toughest platformers in existence. I'm not kidding: It's well above many of the platformers that we unanimously consider to be the genre's most difficult. It honestly makes those like Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Earthworm Jim, Mickey Mania, Prehistorik Man, and the Adventure Island games (save for the first one) look tame in comparison.

What you have to know, going in, is that the game's being stupidly difficult isn't an accident. It was designed to be that way. It was specially crafted to be highly challenging platformer for advanced players. And if you're not one of those, then you're going to be in for a really rough time.

That's something that you have to seriously consider when you're deciding whether or not you want to play it.

The thing about High Seas Havoc is that it's unyielding in its desire to seriously challenge you. Right from the start, it clearly communicates to you that it doesn't care to ease you in or ever offer you any respite. It hits you with considerable challenges in its opening stage, and then it only gets more challenging from there.

It has no concept of "mercy."

It's not like other games in which the stages are really challenging but the boss battles aren't quite as bad, or vice versa, no. Both its stages and its boss battles are really tough. Both challenge you at a high level and do so every step of the way.

I have to say, though, that the boss battles' level of difficulty is substantially higher than the stages'. They're much more demanding and unforgiving. They require you to exhibit great precision, superior evasion skills, quick reflexes, and expert pattern- and movement-reading. If you don't do this, the boss is likely to kill you really quickly. And that'll be a problem because you need to stay alive long enough to get a sense of how the boss operates.

If you're someone who doesn't have much patience or someone who has little tolerance for repetition, it could be absolutely soul-killing to get to a boss, die in seconds each time and thus learn nothing, and then have to replay an entire stage (what's likely a ridiculously difficult stage) to get back to the boss and give yourself a chance to hopefully see what the next part of its attack-cycle looks like.

What's worse is that some boss battles, like the one in which you fight the werewolf magician, are really lengthy. They last 3-4 minutes, and thus they force you to stay locked in for a considerably long period of time. So just imagine a scenario in which (a) your mind starts to drift at the three-and-half-minute mark and consequently you forget how to position yourself, take a rock to the face, and die, and (b) then you have to spend five minutes getting back to the boss and another three-and-a-half minutes enduring the same series of slowly elapsing attack-cycles.

You can see where that can get extremely frustrating.

Having watched Captain Jax battle a few of these bosses, I went in with advanced knowledge of their attack-cycles and strategies for how to deal with them, but really, that didn't make the battles any easier. Because what matters most in boss battles is execution. If you're not able to properly position yourself, correctly time your movements and dodges, and land strikes when you need to, you'll die. And you'll quickly come to understand that memorization, alone, can't do much for you.

(I have to note that there's no reason for you to ever use Havoc's rolling move. It's completely useless. It's slow in execution, it only advances you four tiles, and it has no invincibility frames attached to it. If an attack or a projectile is coming your way, it's quicker and safer to dodge it simply by walking either left or right.)

As someone who's capable of handling these boss battles, I really like them. They have some really appealing qualities to them: They're well-designed (you'll recognize that a lot of planning went into them), intense, exciting, and challenging in a way that makes you feel greatly satisfied when you finally emerge victorious.

I promise you that you'll feel like nothing short of a gaming god when you finally defeat the final boss, who stands among one of the most difficult in gaming history!

The platforming challenges are very difficult, too, but at the same time, they're creative and interesting and often quite fun. I really enjoy engaging with them.

They're frustrating and annoying at times, sure, but still they always have the character of being intense in an engrossing way. They grip you and put you in an animated state and consequently fill you with all kinds of excited emotions.

Unfortunately, though, they're sometimes dragged down by an unwelcome level-design element: intentionally cruel enemy and object placement. I'm talking about the troll-type "Gotcha!" stuff: enemies suddenly appearing on platform edges right as you're about to land on them; enemies being placed on higher levels, just out of the camera's view, for the purpose of causing you suffer a damaging collision that you couldn't see coming; and enemies (bats and birds) and objects (rocks, stalactites and boxes) suddenly dropping on your head from out of nowhere.

It's those types of level-design elements that wind up causing the majority of your deaths (the most infuriating of them are the final stage's flying boxes, which, at certain points, endlessly pour in from all directions, in sets of two or three, and make platforming a rather unpleasant experience). And that's annoying because they really don't need to exist. The game doesn't need them. It's challenging enough without them.

High Seas Havoc would have been a better, more-fairly-designed game without them.

It also would have been nice had its developers included a way to save your progress. For whatever reason, they decided not to incorporate a save or password system, and put you in a position in which you have to play through the game in one sitting. This is a problem because it takes 2-3 hours to complete a play-through even when you know how to handle the game's challenges (unless you're the rare expert who can complete it in less than an hour).

That's pretty lengthy for a 2D platformer.

So its creators absolutely should have added a progress-recording function of some kind.

So yeah--High Seas Havoc is an extremely tough game. I consider it to be one of the most difficult and most demanding platformers I've ever played.

So believe me when I say that you're going to have to be on top of your game if you hope to beat this one. You're going to have to exhibit high-level skill and remained dialed in the whole time.

Because we're talking about a game that has the power to scare off even the most seasoned platformer enthusiast.

(And you'll definitely want to avoid the PAL version of High Seas Havoc. From what I've read, it doesn't have unlimited continues. It provides you only three of them, which is insane. I mean, when I decide to play a game, I usually make sure to seek out the most difficult version of it to avoid feeling like a coward who's running from a challenge, yeah, but even I'm not crazy enough to play the PAL version of High Seas Havoc! I don't need that kind of stress in my life.)

 Honestly, it would be a shame if people were to stay away from High Seas Havoc because of what they heard about its difficulty because that would cause them to miss out on experiencing its visuals and music, both of which are very appealing.

Its visuals, in particular, are stunningly great, and I'd even go as far to say that they're spectacular. It's easily one of the best-looking 16-bit games I've ever seen.

It has a number of powerfully enchanting visual qualities: It's filled with large-scale, gorgeously rendered set pieces and environments. Its textures are richly colored, strikingly vivid, and highly detailed, and thus they create settings that cause you to be overcome with feelings of wonder and delight every time you look upon them. Its backgrounds are beautiful and breathtaking, and they capture your attention with their alluring imagery and their multiple scrolling layers, which flow together in a way that's simply captivating. And its characters are highly animated and very expressive.

There are, admittedly, a few instances in which the game is a little too visually ambitious. There are times when it presents stages like Frozen Palace 1 and 2, which are packed with so much imagery and animation that they become visually noisy and cause you to lose sight of Havoc and fail to notice certain enemies (those that are colored similarly to the background).

But really, this is a minor graphical issue, and it's easily forgivable because it's clearly a byproduct of the artists' strong ambition.

I mean, I'm not seriously going to complain about a game because it was a little too eager to look amazing at all times, no. I'll cheerlead that kind of effort every time.

It's simply an artistically brilliant game. When I was playing through it, there were several instances in which I couldn't help but just stop and admire what it was doing visually. I couldn't help but become filled with feelings of awe as I intently observed its burning towns and their mesmerizing distortion effect; its ice stages' lustrous, glorious aurora-borealis background; and its parallax effects and specifically its multi-layer oceans, skylines, and caves, some of which are formed from up to six layers (this is made possible by the advanced technique that I talked about in my Skyblazer piece: high-definition memory access, which allows designers to split single layers into multiple layers).

In my opinion, High Seas Havoc is worth playing simply for the purpose of seeing what it does visually.

It's just fun to look at!

High Seas Havoc also has amazing music. Its stages and boss battles are accompanied by high-spirited, booming tunes that are orchestral and symphonic in character and thus powerfully invigorating. At all times, these tunes make you feel as though you're on an epic adventure and heroically braving your way forward.

They're truly inspiring tunes, and they're the type that'll stick with you and continue playing in your head long after you've completed the game (provided that you don't get sick of them after listening to each one of them for 2-3 hours at a time).

This, as we've learned, isn't a game that tries to hide its influences, and it's pretty eager to let you know that its music was party inspired by the Final Fantasy games.

It wastes no time in doing this. It informs you of its inspiration in its opening scene, which immediately displays a rotating green crystal, which looks as though it was taken directly from a Final Fantasy game, and introduces a tune whose intro sounds remarkably similar to the Final Fantasy series' prelude theme's.

It reminds you again later on in its second snow stage, Mr. Chester 2, which is accompanied by a tune whose intro is so incredibly similar to Final Fantasy IV's overworld theme's that you can almost feel the tune trying to desperately prevent itself from giving into temptation and just simply transitioning into the latter.

The game's composer, Emi Shimizu, never goes as far as to rip off tunes from the Final Fantasy games, no. All she does, rather, is sneak in a few musical references and do so for the purpose of telling us what her work was inspired by and what she hoped for it to live up to.

And well, I'd say that she succeeded in her endeavor and consequently created one of the 16-bit era's greatest soundtracks.

So even if you decide not to play High Seas Havoc, you should at least do yourself a favor and head over to YouTube and listen to the game's music. It's really that good.

 "So how do you feel about High Seas Havoc overall?" you might be wondering at this point.

Well, I don't know if saying this makes me seem crazy or not, but I actually really like this game! I consider it to be a solid platformer and something of a hidden gem.

It has some really appealing qualities: Its platforming challenges are creative and challenging in a way that arouses your competitive spirit and keeps you intensely engaged. Its boss battles are equally intense and exciting, and they leave you feeling incredibly satisfied when you win them. Its visuals are stunningly great and often awe-inspiring. And its music is amazingly energetic and wonderfully epic in character and thus all at once stirring, inspiriting and invigorating.

Admittedly, it can be hard to tolerate some of the game's intentionally cruel design choices and specifically the "Gotcha!" stuff like bats and boxes dropping down on you, from out of nowhere, at the most inconvenient times. Continuously losing minutes of progress because the same questionably placed, hard-to-avoid bird keeps interrupting your jumps and knocking you into spikes can absolutely become infuriating.

But it's worth putting up with such nonsense, I say, because the other 90% of what the game does is fair and reasonable and very much has the character of a well-designed, quality platformer.

The game is, for most of its duration, fun and engaging, and you'll be missing out on an enjoyable platformer experience if you get scared off by its worst parts, which, honestly, constitute only a small part of the package.

If your opinion is that "difficult" equals "bad," then there's probably not much that I can do to convince you that High Seas Havoc is worth your time. I can't lie and tell you that you won't be frustrated and probably come to hate this game.

But for those of you who enjoy highly challenging platformers like Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Kid Chameleon, Rocket Knight Adventures, Dynamite Headdy and The Lion King, I recommend that you seek out and play this game. It's right up your alley.

All I can say in closing is that I'm glad that I decided to ignore the naysayers and play High Seas Havoc for myself. I had a fun time with it, and I enjoyed taking on and overcoming its challenges. I derived a lot of satisfaction from the experience and came away from it with a strong feeling of accomplishment.

And now I'm looking forward to playing through the game again and attempting to improve upon my last two performances and this time achieve victory in three credits or less!

Because that's what High Seas Havoc has inspired me to do.

I call that another big win for good ol' Data East.