Lifeforce's Blogs

(Note: I spend several paragraphs here talking about the MSX. If you'd rather just read about the freeware game La-Mulana, skip to the bit I've highlighted in bold below, or just google it for yourself)

(Other Note: Also, there aren't any pictures here. This is because I have no way to upload pictures and also because I am lazy. Mostly lazy)

Let me take you back to a time before 256 colour palettes, before the CD-ROM, back when the amount of RAM a computer had was mentioned in kilobytes, or if you were a serious hardcore obsessive computer nut, megabytes.

The time is the early 1980's and Microsoft Japan is creating a groundbreaking new concept in home computing - an industrywide computer standard. Where before only one company could make a particular computer brand, many manufacturers could make MSX computers and they were all compatible with the same software.

Many franchises were to start on the MSX - Metal Gear, Bomberman, Parodius and Snatcher to list a few, many of which have influenced both game players and game makers. Also, Hideo Kojima, can you re-release Snatcher?

Anyway, long story short, the MSX didn't catch on in the UK and the US and IBM PC became the established standard worldwide. Except for Macs, which don't count.

"But, Lifeforce," I hear you ask, "where is this gosh-darned freeware game I was promised and what does the MSX have to do with any of it? Where's my payoff for reading/skipping over all that garbage you wrote?"

Well, in 2005, a group of independent Japanese developers called GR3 Project released a game called La-Mulana, a tribute to the almost forlorn MSX.

Professor Lemeza travels to the temple of La-Mulana, a place that was only rumoured to exist and supposedly contains the master civilization of the planet - the civilization from which all other civilizations spawned.

This closely resembles action-adventure games of the time period, like Castlevania or Metroid. Lemeza starts the game only with his MSX laptop and a whip and must find other items to survive and to explore further into the temple.

And when I say "must find other items to survive", I mean he must find other items to survive. This game is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Lemeza starts the game without much health, takes a lot of damage from enemies, dies instantly upon touching lava and can only swim for a few seconds since he health will constantly drain incredibly fast in water. Even if those aren't a problem, there are still brain-taxing puzzles to solve and deadly traps to avoid.

Besides items, you can also find ROMs in the temple. These can be inserted into the MSX to change how certain things work, such as increasing whip damage... or causing Lemeza to die in one hit.

But why should I explain everything to you? Go download the game and read the manual (you really need to read the manual, trust me). You can find it on Google by searching for La-Mulana. It'll probably be the first hit. What can I say? I have no idea how to add links in this blog interface.