Reader request: Herc's Adventures

Hercules saying, "Where's the beef?" is going to live in the part of my brain that occasionally leaks non-sequiturs into my consciousness for reasons I'll never understand.

This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I never played Herc’s Adventures as a kid, which I’ll chalk up to the Playstation in the house being my sister’s and not mine, and my not having a Sega Saturn, either. I would have had a lot of fun with it back then, too, as a big fan of what LucasArts did with a previous action title, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but hey, at least I have access to it in the present. It’s available for purchase through a Playstation 3 as a Playstation Classic, which you can play on either your PS3 or your Playstation Portable, and now I do have a Saturn, too. You probably want to get a move on picking it up on the former before Sony won’t let you do that anymore, but I should probably talk about the game before I mention where it’s available, huh?

In Herc’s Adventures, you play as Herc — short for Hercules, of course — or Atlanta (Atalanta), or Jason, sans his Argonauts. Your goal is to rescue Persephone from Hades, the god of the underworld, as he has kidnapped her. Zeus can’t go and do it himself for some reason — some god of gods you are, Z — but since crops aren’t growing and the world seems like it’s getting worse by the day without the goddess of nature around, you don’t have much time to argue that point with the big guy. Plus, Herc isn’t exactly known for being a thinker in actual Greek mythology. He’s kind of just a violent oaf who doesn’t know his own strength, who probably sounded a lot like a Greek Zapp Brannigan. LucasArts obviously agrees with that sentiment, which is why you get Herc, in his best mid-20th-century movie action star voice, saying things like, “My dad is a god.” and “Check out my muscles!” And, because LucasArts loved their little jokes like this, “Where’s the beef?” while searching for a cow.

The game looks and feels (and sounds) like a cartoon thanks to little bits like that, which is to its credit. When you defeat a human soldier, their armor flies off, and they start running around to save their lives while wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, noted traditional piece of Greek clothing. You can pick these soldiers up off of the ground and use them as a weapon against other enemies, just like you can pick up a small building or a giant boulder. The facial expressions for all of the characters, be they NPCs or foes or your protagonists, are well-animated, really using the power of the Saturn/Playstation in a way that the consoles of the previous generation could not have handled with as much detail as is shown here: the Saturn and Playstation equivalents of Mode 7 graphics, which became the norm following their use on the Super Nintendo in the previous gen, are on full display here, every time an enemy throws a barrel or spear at you or when you are launched across the screen in a catapult.

A surface look at Herc’s Adventures had certain kinds of fans and critics wondering why a game like this would release on 32-bit hardware — IGN’s review said it “doesn’t look that bad” even though it’s not a “racing sim” or “fighting game,” which should tell you a bit about the visual obsessions of the time — but LucasArts really utilized the extra power and memory of that generation’s consoles to include voice acting and some exceptional animation, especially in the much-larger-than-everyone-else-in-the-game gods and boss monsters. You would be forgiven for assuming that Herc’s Adventures was a 1990s PC game that was later ported over to consoles, but no, the Saturn and Playstation were able to handle that sort of thing, and this game was original to those platforms.

The extensive overworld is one singular entity, too, with no loading screens or breaks between areas of any kind. The music changes when you enter a new zone of the map, and that’s your indication that you’re somewhere different than you just were. You can traverse the entire map in this unbroken fashion, so long as you have whatever items you need to progress, with the only interruption coming with your death. When you die, whether it’s as Herc or Atlanta or Jason, you are sent to the underworld. You then have to fight your way out, with each visit to Hades’ realm sending you deeper within, and with more and more foes to fight on your way out. During these segments, you don’t have any of the items you were carrying, and whatever health you exit Hades (the place) with is how much health you’ll have in your return to the surface world. So, don’t take escaping Hades lightly, or you’ll be back there again in no time. And you only get five trips to Hades before your stay there becomes permanent and your game ends, too.

Image credit: Game Fix

The goal of Herc’s Adventures is to explore the entire map, meet all of the gods who are willing to help you once you help them with whatever it is they ask you to do — Hera wants you to retrieve the cow Io from a well-fortified Sparta, for instance, and carry the creature all the way back to her shrine in a neighboring town — then free Persephone by confronting Hades about that whole deal. To do so, you will take control of one of the three playable characters (or two of three, if you are playing cooperatively with a friend), and start exploring. You’ll find locked doors, barred passages, boats you need Poseidon’s blessing to use, and so on, so you’ll then turn around and try to find keys, the strength to lift enormous boulders, gods like Poseidon to get said blessings… you do a lot of walking and running and jumping, and you’re defending yourself against soldiers and wild boars and mythological creatures the whole time, too.

Each of the three characters plays differently. Herc is, unsurprisingly, in possession of the most raw power of the trio. He moves a bit on the slow side, though, which leaves him more open to attacks from faster opponents: even something like a lowly spearman can be a drag on your health if Herc can’t bash him with his low-range melee club fast enough. Atlanta has a bow, so she has range, and quickness to boot, but there are downsides to playing that way, too: sometimes you do need to get right up in someone’s face and attack quickly, and Atlanta’s charged attack relies a bit on predicting where an enemy will be instead of where they currently are, as well. Jason kind of splits the difference between the two, as he has a dagger for close-up melee, and a charged up slingshot attack for some more distance-based fighting.

Each character has a health meter and a strength meter: the first one is self-explanatory, and every character starts with the same amount of health, but the second is both stamina and a gauge of how strong your character is. You can use this second bar to run faster, to pick up objects, and so on, but if your strength meter isn’t high enough, you won’t be able to pick up certain objects, like those larger boulders, at all. There are ways to boost both your health and your strength, so it’s not like Atlanta’s early low strength is a forever disadvantage, for instance, but it’s something to note in how you’ll have to approach the game and what you’ll have to focus on growing when given the chance to do so, or even who you’ll pick from the start. Atlanta will let you avoid direct confrontations with enemies for the most part, which is especially helpful early on before you start finding upgrades, but is weaker than Herc, which can show up in notable ways when you’re surrounded by foes. Herc starts with nearly twice the base strength of Atlanta, but moves like he looks — which is to say, someone who skips leg day — so he’ll be taking more abuse than she or Jason would.

Like in Zombies Ate My Neighbors, you have a ton of items at your disposal, which you will want to save for when you need them the most, or when they make the most sense. Gyros restore health, because of course they do. You can also find assist items like hawks, which will fly around your character for a time and attack anyone who approaches you — this can be helpful both for evening the odds in a fight with a lot of baddies, or to help as a distraction so you can slip out of an area mostly undetected while the hawk draws all of the attention. There are loads of consumable weapons, too, from the obvious ancient Greek additions like throwable spears and Zeus’ lightning bolts, to more LucasArts-flavored selections, like a hot pepper that lets you breathe fire, or the doll that shrinks its targets, or the laser. Hey, if Satan can have a gun in Supergiant’s Hades, then Herc can have a laser, alright?

You won’t find merchants with full shops or anything like that in Herc’s Adventures, but you will find peddlers with one specific ware, which they’ll either require a certain amount of gold from you for, or they’ll request a trade of other items. Trade 80 spears for a single health-restoring Gyro in the middle of Sparta, for instance, or spend some of your hard-earned gold coins on bombs before you enter an area where you need ranged attacks to take out everyone throwing spears at you. It also costs a single gold coin to save, but given you have just five chances to traverse the entirety of the ancient Greek world before you get a Game Over, you won’t want to be cheap about saving.

I enjoyed my time with Herc’s Adventures, but I do agree that it can feel a little same-y sometimes when it comes to the combat, which you will be doing a lot of. Make sure you’re playing with a character you enjoy the combat options for, and mix things up with the various items, or else the game can feel a little stale in that regard, or frustrating if you’re stuck with where to go next and have to keep taking on the same hordes you’ve already defeated. All the consumable weapons are there for a reason: you want to make sure you’re deploying them when it’s most appropriate and not just at every low-level grunt you come across, sure, but they exist to be used, to change up the pace and sometimes to get you to laugh at how they work. So use ‘em!

The game as a whole doesn’t overstay its welcome, and when you find the character you like using the most, the slight issue with combat isn’t nearly as noticeable, either. Overall, it is a lot of fun to play and look at and listen to Herc’s Adventures, and it would be nice if it were more recently available than on the Playstation 3’s version of Sony’s digital storefront. But hey, we wouldn’t have legal access to it at all if it had stayed a Saturn-exclusive like it had originally been planned as, so at least we can be thankful for that.

Thanks to @momichangedname on Twitter for the game request

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