Yolanda - Atari ST Review

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Published on October 20, 2019 2:34:35 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4qJIcevXYo

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Mortal Kombat (1992)

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Review

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Yolanda was one of those games which I remember as a kid, it came as a demo on a cover disk for something, the disk is somewhere in my collection, it must be either on a ST Format or ST User disk. I remember playing, or at least trying to play the demo and my experience didn’t last very long, it wasn’t that it was completely terrible, it was that it gets so difficult, very quickly.

In fact first time playing this you will probably lose all of your lives and see the game over screen within ten seconds.

So Yolanda is a single screen one-player platformer where you simply have to get to the exit in time. Now if you take too long when you start the level then the platform that you are standing on will catch on fire. So basically you have to keep moving and worse Yolanda doesn’t seem to have any ability to kill any of the enemies on the screen, so you are totally reliant on dodging and jumping through.

I believe that there are around 50 levels in all and each time you die it sends you to a random stage, so you get a different one each play, which makes it much harder to remember the pattern of the stages. Memorisation is important here because there are numerous occasions where the only way to complete a level is to jump on platforms which are invisible until you jump on them. Yes, this is one of those games where you are going to have to experiment, die, experiment, die, case and repeat until you eventually complete it.
Graphically the game looks good without really impressing all that much. The sprite animation is smooth and you can easily identify what everything is so it does its job. It does lack a bit of variety in the stage designs and the enemies do tend to repeat themselves, but overall it does look good enough. Again this is a single screen game, so we don’t get any of the scrolling jerkiness that happens in so many ST games.

I’ve seen people play the Amiga version and for some reason it has a different soundtrack. I prefer the one that the ST version has, but it’s really odd why it differed, you’d thought that they would share resources.

Game play wise the only thing that Yolanda is able to do is jump. She cannot attack enemies, pick up items and will die in one hit. As a result touching virtually anything will result in death. Add to this certain platforms are red herrings, they will instantly disappear, or set on fire if you touch them, again ending in death. Oh and if you wait too long at the start of the level, then the platform you start on will catch on fire, I’m not joking about this, sometimes you only have less than a second to react. There’s one level where you have to jump immediately or else a flying fireball will kill you in the first few seconds. Even if you complete a level, it’s usually over in 30 seconds.

Apart from the large difficulty the game plays well with the joystick, with Yolanda being very responsive. It’s just whether you are happy about dying on regular intervals. I have never beaten Yolanda, but whilst it can be frustrating, it isn’t necessarily a bad game. For what it set out to do, it does a reasonable job and is worth a play, however there are notably better platforming games on the Atari ST.

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