I've been digging deep into the library of shows on Paramount Plus, and found a shining gem buried under the detritus of MTV reality shows and ill-advised reboots of classic action series. (Since when does MacGyver work extensively with a team of hackers and mercenaries? Wasn't he kind of a wandering lone wolf in the original series?)
I never watched Legends of the Hidden Temple when it first aired in 1993, but I'm watching it now, and can totally understand why it was so popular. Combine the physical challenges of Double Dare with the ambiance of an Indiana Jones movie, then add just a touch of PBS-quality educational value, and you get a game show that's briskly paced and consistently entertaining. It's not always fair, as other blogs have already pointed out, but watching a well prepared contestant work his way through the temple and escape with the treasure of the week firmly tucked under his arm is a genuine, fist-pumping thrill. You will never be happier for a kid in a baggy orange tracksuit clutching a second-rate prop.
Legends of the Hidden Temple isn't directly related to video games, as the somewhat embarrassing Nick Arcade was. However, the producers did want to capture some of the excitement of a video game in the show, even granting contestants "pendants of life" that serve as 1UPs if they're caught by the Mayan temple guards, so I think I'm justified in covering it here. Besides, it's just plain better than Nick Arcade was. Watch the two shows back to back and tell me I'm wrong.
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| Plus you get this chatty Mayan statue with glowing red eyes, which beats a stupid noseless kid in a board game any day of the week. (image from Reddit) |
What doesn't make sense as a video game, but somehow ended up as one anyway, is Libble Rabble, which I've been frequently playing on my Legends Gamer Pro. (I finally got the system running CoinOpsX after hours of blood, sweat, and tears, and ultimately the realization that I was skipping over a step in the online tutorials. Uh, whoops.)
Even with Pac-Man's Toru Iwatani as its lead designer, Libble Rabble is one of the few Namco games that Midway wouldn't bring to the United States with its brand slapped all over it. It's not hard to understand why... not only is it running on a 16-bit processor that must have been hella expensive back in 1983, it's abstract and cutesy; a digital take on the pegboards your grandmother might have used to make string art back in the 1970s.
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| Sure, this string art is pretty. But it doesn't exactly scream "best selling video game," does it? (image from Amazon) |
Beyond that, it's a twin stick video game that isn't as immediately intuitive as most titles in that genre. With Robotron: 2084 or Smash TV, you move the hero with one joystick and fire at enemies with the other, easy peasy. Libble Rabble makes you play as two arrows facing in opposite directions, with a string tied around them. Wrap the string around the pegs onscreen, then either touch the arrows together or make them both touch an edge of the screen, and they capture whatever's inside the loop, be it mushrooms or brightly colored wizards or hidden treasure chests. It's hard to get a handle on this method of attack, and it gets doubly awkward when you forget which joystick controls which arrow, and when the screen gets jam-packed with monsters. Your early games won't last long. Your later games will last longer, but you'll wonder why your score has barely cracked five figures by the eighth stage.
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| "Me want Honey Comb! And also to know what the hell me is doing!" (image from Hatch Studios) |
It turns out that there's a lot of hidden secrets in Libble Rabble which you'll have to exploit to crank up your point total. You could just pull the string around the whole playfield and bring a quick end to the stage, but you'll have to be much more precise with your loops to first reveal the treasure chests and unlock their contents. When furry monsters who look like the short-lived Honeycomb mascot spill out of the chest, you'll need to scramble to corral them all with your string and capture them. There are also seeds scattered around the screen, but don't grab them with your string just yet! Instead, let them blossom into flowers, which eventually spawn fruits. Draw a loop around these purple fruit things and you'll fill up a bar on the edges of the screen, which when topped off freezes the action and offers you a shot at a huge point bonus.
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| You're probably looking at this image and going, "Huh?" It takes a while for the game to click, but it's worth the time and effort. (image by Internet Archive) |
Libble Rabble isn't easy for the average player to comprehend, much less describe to others. Reviewers struggling for a comparison usually head straight to Qix, but Qix is cold, stark, mathematical, and frightening in its urgency. You move exclusively in cardinal directions, and you have to keep moving, or you'll die from a collision with roving sparks or a swirling cluster of lines. Libble Rabble is gentler, messier, and more experimental... a high school art project brought to life with the magic of electronics. The colors are brighter, the enemies are less aggressive, and the player is given plenty of freedom in how they build their loops. Unlike Qix, the shapes you build aren't permanent, so feel free to drag your string wherever you please without being trapped by your own creations.
Further turning down the heat is the soundtrack, which is altogether pleasant and occasionally impressive. Beat a few bonus stages and Libble Rabble pulls a rendition of the classic Wedding March out of nowhere that's so good, you might consider actually using it at your own wedding. Well, if you were really that nerdy. And your fiancé was really that tolerant.
It's not hard to understand why Libble Rabble was forsaken by Midway, and why Namco wouldn't take a chance on an American release of the Super NES port ten years later. However, it's worth untangling this Gordian knot of a game, if just to admire how completely different it is from the hundreds of dot-munchers and alien-blasters that were popular in the early 1980s.
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