Palamedes (NES)

Palamedes, named for the character of Greek myth who supposedly invented dice, quite appropriately is a game based entirely around them. While many matching-based puzzle games ask the player to line up similar symbols or blocks of the same color, Palamedes shakes that common formula up a bit by making those matched blocks dice blocks. The game is a lot less absurd than the strange box art would seem to suggest, but it does still set itself apart with this more in-depth approach to matching up colored cubes.

In Palamedes, the player controls a character at the bottom of the screen who can run back and forth, toting a large dice block along as they do so. The dice block contains the sides from 1 to 6 as one would expect, with the player able to turn the cube through that sequence with repeated presses of the B button. Once a player has the number they want, they can fire it with the A button, shooting it up at a descending ceiling of colored die cubes that is six blocks wide. If the player isn’t quick enough about eliminating the slowly descending dice above them, they’ll lose the round when it reaches their little character. In many puzzle games with this set up, launching your cube into other cubes would possibly trigger a match, but Palamedes has an interesting idea of how to change up how you view a matching puzzle game. When you launch your die up at another die, if they match, they will both disappear, and a block with that die number will appear in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Palamedes isn’t actually about matching blocks as they appear in the playfield but rather storing them in that bar in special arrangements and turning them in by pressing down.

The matches in Palamedes can come in many different forms, the game rewarding you for doing the more complex arrangements. The simplest to understand is a typical line-up of dice of the same number, the game even color-coding each number so that this scoring method is the quickest and easiest to find. So long as you have three or more of a number lined up consecutively in your bar, you can turn them in to clear some lines of incoming blocks without having to match them. However, these matches do need to be set up properly, as you can’t turn them in if you break a different numbered dice block and it interrupts the chain. That combination becomes even more important when you aim for the more rewarding sequential arrangements. If you manage to break blocks in number order such as 1, 2, and then 3, you can turn those in as well, with a full line-up of 1 through 6 being the most powerful match in the game, able to clear 5 lines once it’s turned in. There are some more gimmicky dice arrangements you can turn in as well, such as arrangements of dice that total up to 21 when added together or the game allowing you to turn in three pairs together, but the bread and butter of your matches will definitely be setting up the straights or matching identical numbers. You can just blast blocks mindlessly to clear them one at a time, your bar only holding six but discarding the oldest one when a new one enters, but it’s not a tenable strategy in the long run, the game counting on you to clear lines properly to keep playing.

Since it’s a bit more complex than simply matching identical colored blocks, Palamedes’s more in-depth options for making matches makes the whole affair require more thought. Matching the same number dice blocks pays out with less line clears than the sequential straights, meaning it can be wiser to pass on a clear set-up to go for a bigger payout. This isn’t quite as thoughtful a process as a player might hope though. Palamedes’s descending blocks have so many blatant matches already laid out that it doesn’t require a careful eye to identify them, the player rarely needing to do any set up to get large matches or almost full straights. At most you might have to blast a block or two in your way, but most the time the front rows are all set to be stored in your bar and turned in for easy line clears. This isn’t helped by how slowly the dice descend from above. They pop in row by row at a slow rate that can’t be sped up in any way, meaning it’s pretty easy to get a huge line clear lined up in your bar and you just have to sit and wait until there are even enough rows on screen for it to be turned in for full effectiveness. The game does eventually get difficult enough that you might worry a bit about failure, but Palamedes in general doesn’t seem to know how to push the player. Some of the difficulty in the game only comes from the fact you can only rotate your personal dice block in rising number order, limiting you a bit and requiring some quick spinning in later levels. Being able to spin it in reverse order would allow the game’s pace to increase drastically to compensate for your increased capability, but that is sadly not an option here.

The main mode for playing Palamedes is its twenty stage single player option, each level having a set number of lines you need to clear before you’ve finished a stage. This is perhaps where it’s most evident the game can’t pressure the player very well, as these stages don’t really have the amount of lines needed to make things high-paced or hard. You can set up a six of a kind or a full 1 through 6 straight and erase quite a bit of the level’s total lines in a quick sweep. There are difficulty levels that push the game speed up as you get further, but Palamedes still can’t help itself when it comes to offering you easy matching set-ups even then. It does manage to avoid being boring because you still have to arrange those matches in your bar and can search for better ones, but it’s not quite as active as a regular color matching puzzler would be.

The game does offer a mode where failure is more likely, that being its versus mode. Either with a human player or in a tournament mode against game-controlled opponents, your matching skills are tested a bit more as you can now interfere with your opposition or have your own play field messed with. By getting the bigger line clears, you send over more blocks to your opponent’s side of the screen, the round ending when someone has been crowded out by incoming blocks. The fact you can’t control the pace of the falling blocks on your side does lead to a similar issue from the other mode though, that being you can end up sitting on a strong match for a while as you wait to turn it in for full value. Your opponent can only ever send over a max of four lines as well, so that means you don’t have to worry too much about being vulnerable as you sit and wait for more blocks to come on screen. You can increase the number of rounds you play against each competitor in the tournament, but this seems to mostly make things longer rather than tougher. Oddly enough though, the dice arrangements you and your opponent get are different, meaning matches can come at different times and players might get better set-ups than each other. This actually benefits the game as players can gain edges and begin to feel the pressure of incoming blocks more than usual, but for the most part this just feels like regular play but with some abrupt surges of dice entering your play area.

THE VERDICT: It’s important to stress that Palamedes doesn’t fail as a matching-based puzzler, its problem just seems to be setting up a proper challenge for someone who understands its mechanics. To make its matching method work it has to put out some easy-to-identify set-ups front and center because blasting a single block that doesn’t work in your straight or match will pollute your bar. Therefore, even when up against competent opponents or in single player’s late levels, the only real increase in difficulty comes from the speed of dropping blocks rather than the way the dice are arranged. You’ll need to be quick and observant of course, but it doesn’t put the proper level of pressure on the player to make the matching truly energetic and involved. Palamedes’s functional foundation just doesn’t have the strength to make the unique dice matching concept excel.

And so, I give Palamedes for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An OKAY rating. Palamedes is actually a pretty good baseline for what a block matching puzzle game looks like when it’s just average. It works, it’s fair, its got a functional and interesting approach to the matching formula, it just doesn’t pack the punch needed to make it engaging. Turning in your matches to clear lines is a good way to reward the player for being more ambitious in their set-ups, but the structure of the game necessitates that the dice are all too often presented in a way that makes those set-ups easier than they should be. Clearing some blocks to get to the goods would make things more involved, but Palamedes also has too many options for clearing lines that it can be hard to properly block bigger matches since they can instead swing for plenty of small ones instead. Really, just a decent increase in game speed could do wonders for applying the right amount of pressure to the player, but right now, it’s just a decent idea that can’t quite find the foothold it needs to compel a player to engage heavily with its design.

A dice-based matching game may flesh out the usually simple color-matching formula, but Palamedes didn’t develop its mechanics enough to make this new idea work as best it could. There are plenty of suggestions for what might make its ideas more engaging, but it’s more likely that its design would need an overhaul to escape its average execution. Whether it be the bottom bar in general, the generosity of line clears, or the way dice are presented to the player, something needs major retooling to inject the energy and difficulty a matching-based puzzler needs to keep the player engaged.