Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #22

Trolls and Tribulations

In my early Commodore 64 years, when I was still timid and unadventurous, I tended to gravitate toward the safe and the familiar. I favored known properties like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Jungle Hunt, Rambo, The Goonies, Bruce Lee and Commando (which, at the time, I thought was a video-game adaptation of the Schwarzenegger flick), and I'd only give an unfamiliar game a look if it had a safe-sounding title like "Jumpman," "Highnoon," "Hard Hat Mack," or one that suggested that the game in question was easy to understand and play.

It was these two inclinations that caused the name "Trolls" to jump out at me as I was flipping through my brother's large collection of floppy disks. I was drawn to it because it was a very simple, straightforward title and because it immediately brought to mind images of recently released fantasy-horror films Gremlins and Ghoulies (my favorite "mini-monster movies," as I called them) and all of those nasty little green creatures whose mischievous antics had brought me so much enjoyment.

(Well, the game's having a short six-letter title also helped its cause. I was, after all, more apt to sample a game if I could easily read its name. And that was kinda ironic because "Trolls" wasn't its actual title. It was only part of it. Its full title, rather, was "Trolls and Tribulations." For many years, I referred to it as only "Trolls" because that was how my brother chose to label it on the disk and because my observation skills were obviously lacking. I mean, it clearly said "Trolls and Tribulations" on the title screen, but somehow I didn't notice. It was either that I simply didn't see the word Tribulation displayed there or that I'd trained my brain to ignore any word that was too big or too hard to pronounce.)

So when I loaded up Trolls, I discovered that it was yet another arcade-like platformer. This wasn't a surprise to me because the Commodore 64, I came to learn over the previous year, was filled with arcade-style and arcade-like games. When I first entered the Commodore 64 scene, I wasn't expecting that to be the case. Before then, I assumed that computers were home mainly to nontraditional software products like vector-based flight simulators, text adventures, word games, strategy games, and others that I perceived to be bizarre or intimidatingly complex. "Computers are only for games that don't fit in anywhere else," I believed.

But that wasn't the case at all. The Commodore 64's library was, in reality, richly diverse, and it included just about any type of game you could think of.

And lucky for me, the Commodore 64 had plenty of simple, easy-to-understand platformers. It had games like Trolls.

It was plainly obvious to me that Trolls was inspired by popular arcade games like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, but I never thought of it as a "clone" of any of them, no. It really wasn't. It was something more. It was much larger in scope than even the most celebrated Mario Bros.- or Donkey Kong-inspired platformer. And its existence served as proof that the Commodore 64 was (a) capable of producing platformers that were on par with or better than those that I was playing in arcades (b) far more versatile than I original thought.

At the start, though, I was pretty skeptical of Trolls because, on the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a purely derivative Mario Bros. clone. It had design aspects and mechanics that appeared to be ripped directly from the latter. "This is simply Mario Bros. with a gun," I thought.

Though, I soon discovered that there was much more to the game. After I cleared out all of the trolls, the action continued, surprisingly, and I was able to travel rightward and into a new part of the stage.

Trolls, it turned out, wasn't your typical arcade-platformer. Its action wasn't a matter of clearing out a single screen and then immediately moving on to the next screen, no. Rather, each of its stages was broken up into two parts: an action segment in which you battled to eliminate a certain number of enemies, and a maze segment that tasked you with finding your way through a dangerous multi-screen labyrinth. (Each stage a "maze" inside a "level," as the game's HUD information explained.)

To clear the initial segment, I had to use my ray gun to blast trolls and encase them in eggs and then knock them into the water below, and I had to do so before they could break free of captivation. This system instantly made sense to me because it was very similar Mario Bros.'s, which had you knocking shellcreepers onto their backs and then rushing to punt them off the the stage before they could recover. The only difference was that in this game, recovering enemies didn't change color or increase their movement speed (there was a faster red troll, but it was instead a unique enemy type that would award you bonus points after you disintegrated it with a single shot).

Trolls' action segments were pretty similar to Mario Bros., sure, but still they had some unique aspects to them. The first was the way in which you engaged enemies. Like I said earlier: You assaulted them with a weapon--a long-range ray gun. And because Trolls' hero had access to such a weapon, he was much more capable than Mario. He was more equipped to handle large enemy hordes. Though, you couldn't just fire away all willy-nilly because there was a built-in constraint: limited ammo.

How Trolls handled this design aspect was rather clever, I thought: In order to replenish your ray gun's energy, you had to return to the stage's animated spawn point and hold down on the joystick. What this did was add an element of tension to the action. It put you in a position in which you were defenseless and had to go into evasion mode and strategically find the opportunity to recharge your gun. It provided the game's action some very important depth.

So I soon realized that Trolls' action segments weren't going to be "easy," like I assumed they would be in the opening moments. I was going to have to put in some work to clear them. I couldn't simply laser-spam my way to victory.

For a while, though, the action segments were quite manageable, and the strategies I'd developed continued to be pretty effective. But eventually things started to get really hairy; in time, the game started to introduce troublesome elements like inconveniently designed stage structures and indestructible foes like the patrolling buzzards and the pursuant skull heads. It's right around then when my being overwhelmed became a regular occurrence.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What came first was my surprising discovery that Trolls' stages had much greater depth to the them.

So the real fun began after I dunked all of the trolls and traveled rightward. That's when I learned that there was more to this opening stage. At that moment, the camera shifted over and revealed an entire second section. And jarringly, this new section a featured a completely different action style; it was wholly platforming-focused, and it had absolutely no troll encounters or gunplay. It wasn't at all like the previous segment.

In this new platforming segment, the challenge was to traverse my way through a maze and locate its exit, and to do that, I had to find keys and use them to open obstructing locked doors. Though, the maze's sprawling layout also invited me to explore branching paths and collect points-awarding treasures like lamps, pots, wizard hats ("Merlin hats," as I called them), and what I identified as "banana peels" (to this day, I still have no idea what these items are supposed to be). And I liked what I was seeing. The maze segment was a cool addition, I thought. It was fun to traverse and explore, and its presence did a lot to help Trolls differentiate itself from standard arcade platformers and develop into something greater.

Over time, these maze segments grew increasingly labyrinthine, and they began to introduce enemies (like patrolling skulls the maze-exclusive hanging spiders) and nasty traps like breakaway floors (and curiously, some stages eschewed action segments altogether and simply placed you in large mazes). And for those reasons, they, too, started to become a big problem for me.

But there was one game element that gave me more trouble than even the most difficult action or maze segment: the controls. They just weren't very intuitive.

To start, Trolls had something I'd never seen before: two different kinds of jumps--a vertical jump that you executed by pushing up on the joystick, and a fixed horizontal jump that was mapped to the action button. And this was a problem for me because I'd always forget which input was which and do things like accidentally dive off a platform ledge, into a watery pit, when my actual intent was to jump straight upward and access the platform above me. When the action would get intense, I'd get flustered and invariably execute the wrong type of jump and kill myself. And in the mazes, within which a high degree of precision was required, I'd frequently miss targets and suffer exasperating deaths.

And since we didn't have a manual, I wasn't aware of some of the game's basic mechanics. I had to stumble into learning them. And in some cases, it took me forever to do so. The best example was the rebounding mechanic. Days went by before I learned, by pure happenstance, that you could rebound off a wall if you executed a horizontal jump while facing it. Before then, I didn't know what to do when I found myself in a position in which I was standing on an isolated one-tile-wide platform and facing a wall; at that point, I was basically softlocked. For whatever reason, I never thought to press the action button, and instead I kept trying to pull off "quick-turn jumps" (as I called them), which would do nothing but result in my walking off the platform and dropping into a death pit (yet, still, I was convinced that the quick-turn jump was a very real "advanced maneuver" that would surely work once I learned how to properly execute it).

Level 2, Maze 1, had the first instance of a required rebounding jump, and because I didn't know of such a maneuver, I got stuck there for about a week.

There was also the problem of the hero's not being able to turn and face the opposite direction while stationary. If you wanted to turn around, you had to move one tile forward, in the direction you were facing, and then return to the previous tile. So if an enemy was approaching you as you were looking away, you'd have no way of engaging them. If you tried to turn around and fire or set up for a leapfrogging horizontal jump, you'd instead walk into them and die. And I'd do this constantly. I could never adapt to the game's repositioning style of directional change, and resultantly I suffered an endless number of collision deaths.

What was worse was that the enemies had indecipherable hitboxes, so I was always hesitant to go anywhere near them. Usually I'd run away from them and thus force myself to have to endure a bunch of extra cycles. Also, because there were so few input options, the designers programmed it to where you had to push down on the joystick to fire the ray gun. Because I was so used to pressing buttons to fire weapons, I'd forget that shooting was mapped to the down-directional and press the action button instead; and resultantly I'd unintentionally jump into an oncoming enemy or dive into the water.

So Trolls had a lot of control irregularities, and there were many instances in which I'd find myself freaking out because enemies were fast approaching and I couldn't remember which input did what. In those instances, I was likely to do anything but the intended action; instead I'd walk or jump into enemies, walk off cliffs, or dive into the water.

Yet still, despite its having a number of troublesome control issues (some of which I was able to adapt to over time), Trolls was a great Commodore 64 game, and I enjoyed playing it. I considered it to be one of my favorite platformers. I loved how inventive it was and how it expanded upon the classic arcade-platformer formula the platforming segments were a clever addition, I thought, and they were a lot of fun to play through.

Also, I loved the game's soundtrack, which was comprised entirely of Classical-music pieces. I recognized a lot of them, but I wasn't yet learned enough to know their titles or their composers' names. All I knew was that they were excellent renditions of those Classical-music pieces I'd heard in all of those movies and TV shows. They were charming, evocative, and just fun to listen to. (I know now that Trolls' are renditions of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major, K. 545; Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny and Rondo a Capriccio Opus 129; Bach's Minuet in D Minor, BWV Anh. 132, Invention 10 and Invention 14; Grieg's Trolltog; and Ellmenreich's Spinnerlied. And now you know, too!)

As an aside: I couldn't help but notice a trend when it came to Commodore 64 soundtracks: They tended to rely heavily on Classical music. Very few of them featured originally created tunes (or a large amount of originally created tunes). And I wasn't sure why that was. One of two things was true, I figured: Commodore 64 developers were lovers of Classical music, or they were just too lazy to think up and compose their own tunes. I wasn't complaining about the use of Classical music, no. I quite liked it. And I thought that its use helped games to feel more sophisticated than they actually were.

In time, after practicing a lot, I became capable of making it pretty far into Trolls. I could reach Level 6, which by the game's definition was 25 stages in. I couldn't never progress any further because at that point, things simply got too crazy. The action segments were filled with an overwhelming amount of enemies, and the maze segments were too complicated. And I'd meet the same type of crushing defeat over and over again no matter how much I improved.

But still, that didn't stop me from regularly returning to Trolls with the intention of progressing farther into it. I'd do so because I was driven by the idea that it might have an ending scene that was worth viewing (though, I couldn't guess as to how far away I was from the "final maze" that I believed to exist). "A game this difficult has to have something special waiting at its end!" I thought.

Unfortunately, I was never able to reach a "final maze," and the process of trying to get there was turning out to be too much a time-sink even for a responsibility-free kid (each run seemed to take hours). It didn't seem worth it to put in all of that time and effort to just to dump all of my lives in the same two mazes--the ones that were crammed with difficult-to-traverse, tightly patrolled two-block platforms. And after I accepted the fact that I simply wasn't skilled enough to advance any further, I started to drift away from Trolls and focus more on other platformers. I decided that Trolls was best enjoyed as a casual experience and that I should only play it once in a while.

Over the years, as the scene changed and I started moving on to other platforms, I saw less and less of Trolls, yet I never abandoned it. Every once in a while, I'd revisit it for a nostalgic quick-play and do so with the aim of having fun with one of my old favorites and letting it remind me why I loved it so much.

In the current era, Trolls and Tribulations has been largely absent from my life. For a number of reasons (including the lack of convenient availability), I just haven't felt the desire to return to it. Whenever I think about playing it, I become overcome with feelings of apprehension because my sense is that I'll quickly get frustrated with its controls and wind up having a poor experience. And I don't want that to happen because such an experience might only serve taint my memories. I'd rather remember Trolls and Tribulations as the fun, wonderfully inventive arcade-like platformer that had the power to evoke a wide range of emotions from me. It was a game that would anger, exasperate or deflate me at one moment but then fill me with a feeling of wonder, joy or accomplishment in the next.

Trolls and Tribulations did many important jobs for me.

Also, I give it two additional credits: It did more than most to acclimate me to the Commodore 64's weird and wild world and help me to feel comfortable in it; and it introduced me to the puzzle-platformer--a genre I've been crazy about ever since.

And because Trolls and Tribulations and its creators were able to do all of that for me--because they were able to help spur my evolution and provide me so many great gaming experiences and wonderful memories--they have my deepest gratitude.