Gordo 106 - The Mutated Lab Monkey is a game released on the Atari Lynx in 1993. The plot involves a renegade monkey, Gordo, that breaks out of a lab and frees all the animal captives....or something, yeah.
This marks the first submission for Atari Lynx. The motivation of this project was to complete my All Platforms Challenge. I went through the complete set of Atari Lynx games including homebrew games. This game represents what I thought was the most entertaining and publish worthy of the set. Thus it is my best attempt at completing the challenge!
To watch this on the emulator you need Mednafen 1.1.
Windows should use the front end provided in the download link. Linux users will have to compile. You MUST use revision 144 in order to play this file! Later versions are only compatible with .mc2 file format and only PCE
games.
You also need a lynx BIOS to run the game in the emulator. And it must be called lynxboot.img.
Basic Game Info
There are two items that Gordo can collect:
Apples - These are your weapons. You can throw them to kill enemies.
However, the throwing animation is slow, you can't throw while jumping, and most enemies take many hits to kill.
Bananas - This increases your health; a must have for this game!
The difficulty in real time of this game is absolutely evil. Half the enemies are almost the size of the screen and do tremendous amounts of damage. You invulnerability period is very short. If you get into a bad position surrounded by enemies you can be clobbered from full health down to death in a matter of 1 second! Those same enemies take 5-6 hits to kill which is a very long time because Gordo's throwing ability is quite slow. In almost every case an enemy is too close to you to kill it before it hits you. This means every enemy in the game requires either blowing through it by taking damage or repeatedly retreating in order to kill it.
Moves/Tricks
Double Tapping left or right will send Gordo into running speed where he flails his arms like a madman. The basic strategy of the TAS is to do this as much as possible.
Gordo's jump height can not be adjusted.
Health never refills! Health is the greatest resource in this game considering half the enemies are about the size of the screen and the hit boxes of everything is huge. So a big part of a TAS is planning the collecting bananas and where to take damage.
One way of conserving health is to take damage from a lesser enemy and use the invulnerability period to go through a more powerful enemy.
When running, Gordo can't get apples or bananas on the ground. However, if you jump on the frame is on top of one, he will grab it. Gordo also can't get items while he is invulnerable. This is the reason I sometimes stop
for seemingly no reason.
Gordo will stay running after jumping as long as you are holding right on the frame you land. This fact can be exploited to keep him in run mode even while moving in different directions or pausing to wait for events.
Summary
Takes damage to save time
Genre: Platform
Emulator: Mednafen1.1
mmbossman: Sorry adelikat, I too hope the site will have a Lynx run someday, but people seem to agree that this shouldn't be the first. Rejecting due to viewer response.
FractalFusion: Accepting for publication into Vault.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
As everyone can probably guess, I had the privilege of viewing and encoding this before it was submitted. I am inclined to agree that this game is the best of the genre that this platform has to offer (though, in my mind, this is not saying very much), and this run is well-executed enough to warrant being published.
I offer my congratulations on the first submitted Lynx run, as well.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3576)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Screw those animals, they can save themselves. Gordo has more important concerns, like beating the game quickly.
Also, I want to point out the rercord count is quite wrong. The actual count is probably about 3000. There seems to be a bug in mednafen's counting.
Wow this game is bad. Did the developers not have a budget at all? I mean, Ninja Gaiden 1 came out in 1988, five years earlier, and has way better visuals and sound, not to mention gameplay that's actually fun.
I like how they completely half-assed the swinging animation, and the way the enemies just fall off the screen when you reach the end of the level. That said, I don't think this is enough of a trainwreck to be worth publishing. No vote.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2823
Location: Northern California
I watched up until level 1-2 before thinking "This is all going to be the same, terrible game."
Abstaining from voting, but if I did vote, it would be a no. Bad game choice... bad system choice, even.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Samsara wrote:
Abstaining from voting, but if I did vote, it would be a no. Bad game choice... bad system choice, even.
This.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
While the premise appears amusing, the game itself is very boring.
Voting meh only because you appear to have ran it well, but I can't vote yes when it's not entertaining at all.
This is not entertaining in the slightest. It's boring, you keep bumping into walls (which may be optimal but looks sloppy) and the levels are almost exactly the same. Even 8 minutes feels too long for this game.
Voting NO.
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
This does seem precise but there's nothing that makes it look superhuman to me - a person unfamiliar with this game.
The same, unimpressive actions are repeated over and over and I got bored ater a couple of minutes, thereafter just keeping it on the side to watch in the corner of my eye.
Nothing seemed to change.
Voting Meh, since it does seem precise, has an amusing premise and has the benefit of bein somewhat soporific.
I'm just some random guy. Don't let my words get you riled - I have my opinions but they're only mine.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
I agree with Sir VG most about this. The swinging animation is pretty funny, but only for about the first minute. The game dragged on. I could go either way about it getting published, so Meh.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Abstaining from voting, but if I did vote, it would be a no. Bad game choice... bad system choice, even.
This.
Sorry guys, but I have to say that is bullshit. I get the feeling people are abstaining because they want a lynx title on the site. If the game sucks, then vote no. Publishing a clearly sub-par game just to get a new console on here makes me feel like we gotta catch 'em all.
I, personally, prefer quality over quantity. If this means that the Lynx is forgotten, then so be it. Just because it is the best game doesn't mean a shitty game should be published.
This game sucks, it does not deserve to be on TASVideos, I vote no.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
I, personally, prefer quality over quantity. If this means that the Lynx is forgotten, then so be it. Just because it is the best game doesn't mean a shitty game should be published.
This game sucks, it does not deserve to be on TASVideos, I vote no.
I personnaly, would prefer this kind of comments coming from the mouth of a taser, its getting annoying how people that do NOTHING pretend to hold the definition of quality or quantity.
This is not quantity here, most obviously, unless you consider the 68 previous movies from adelikat been also just a matter of quantity.
Voting yes, new system, meh system, but still new, and open more tasing possibility, this is original.
I dont think this is the best game on the system btw, but theres no "good" games for sure, so this is a weak yes, but there cant be any (sincere) strong yes for this system i believe.
Now if you ask me, half the nes games are crap and of the average same "quality" as this, they dont deserve to be on tasvideos.org for such ? i dont think so...
I, personally, prefer quality over quantity. If this means that the Lynx is forgotten, then so be it. Just because it is the best game doesn't mean a shitty game should be published.
This game sucks, it does not deserve to be on TASVideos, I vote no.
I personnaly, would prefer this kind of comments coming from the mouth of a taser, its getting annoying how people that do NOTHING pretend to hold the definition of quality or quantity
Are you pretending that just because you know how to make a TAS, that makes your definition of what is entertaining better than that of someone who hasn't published anything here? I just want to make certain I'm understanding your stance properly. Incoming rant warning...
Sticky clearly feels that this game isn't good enough to publish, and you clearly feel that it is. You're both right, because this is a subjective judgement! So basically all you seem to be doing here is saying "Sticky's aesthetic sense is flawed because he isn't a TASer." And that's crap.
TASers will tend to have a better understanding of what goes into making one of these movies. That means that the way they derive entertainment from watching TASes is going to be different from the way that non-TASers derive entertainment. Not better. It's like the difference between a movie buff watching, say, The Matrix, and being entertained by their use of camera angles, reflections, and color, and a normal person watching the same movie and being entertained by cool martial arts and explosions. Both stances are valid, and both are needed. Without the movie buff, cinematography wouldn't have as much of a drive to improve. Without the normal people, there wouldn't be enough of an audience to make it worth making movies at all.
And the same goes for TASVideos' judgement process. The "normal people" who vote here are every bit as important as the TASers, because they're more likely to think the way the people who don't even post on the forums think. There's a huge audience out there that, to a greater or lesser extent, we're all working for. They may not help keep the art going much, but they do watch what the site produces, and it's important that what they watch be of reasonably high quality.
In short, if someone thinks a movie is crap, they should say so. And if they think it's awesome, they should say that too. And when deciding if a movie should be published, we should for the most part ignore why people think movies are crap or awesome.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
I am a taser way back, I feel this game is really boring. No surprise element, no entertainment at all. arukado, you are a weird little man with weird logic. Sticky expressed further my thoughts on this. No offence to adelikat but if people find this entertaining, then wow.. I know, I know, it's a matter of opinion but really...
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
Gordo 106 - The Mutated Lab Monkey is a game released on the Atari Lynx in 1993. The plot involves a renegade monkey, Gordo, that breaks out of a lab and frees all the animal captives....or something, yeah.
There are two items that Gordo can collect:
The difficulty in real time of this game is absolutely evil. Half the enemies are almost the size of the screen and do tremendous amounts of damage. You invulnerability period is very short. If you get into a bad position surrounded by enemies you can be clobbered from full health down to death in a matter of 1 second! Those same enemies take 5-6 hits to kill which is a very long time because Gordo's throwing ability is quite slow. In almost every case an enemy is too close to you to kill it before it hits you. This means every enemy in the game requires either blowing through it by taking damage or repeatedly retreating in order to kill it.
Double Tapping left or right will send Gordo into running speed where he flails his arms like a madman. The basic strategy of the TAS is to do this as much as possible.
When running, Gordo can't get apples or bananas on the ground. However, if you jump on the frame is on top of one, he will grab it. Gordo also can't get items while he is invulnerable. This is the reason I sometimes stop
for seemingly no reason.
