Description

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.

Ilari: Processing