Palamedes (NES) Playthrough
81A playthrough of Hot B's 1990 puzzle game for the NES, Palamedes.
In this video, I play through both game types. I begin with the twenty-stage Player 1 mode, and the Tournament mode begins at 30:40.
Palamedes, named for a prince in Greek mythology who invented dice before being stoned to death, is a falling block-style puzzle game created by Taito for arcades. The NES version, made by Natsume and published by Hot B, was released a couple months ahead of its arcade counterpart.
The object of the game is to eliminate the falling dice before they reach the bottom of the screen and crush you. The B button cycles through the faces of the die held by your "dice shooter," and the A button fires. When the piece you fire hits a match at the top of the screen, the pair is eliminated and becomes part of your "hand" which is shown at the bottom of the screen. Once you've created a hand, you can hit the down button to play it, and the better the hand, the more lines it will eliminate at once. A simple three-of-a-kind will only clear a single line, while a straight flush can clear five. Think poker, just warped into a bizarre gameplay mechanic.
The gameplay, which the manual explains as having taken "the elements of the always popular shooting games and the intriguing puzzle games and fused them together to create a refreshingly new video game experience," is more reliant on reflexes than it is quick thinking.
It doesn’t have the lasting appeal of something like Dr. Mario (released the same month), but it is a lot of fun in the short term. The graphics are clean, the music is good, and the poker/Yahtzee influence adds a neat twist to the gameplay.
You have to wonder who came up with that box art, though. Talk about horrifying.
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