ST-urday #012: Kid Gloves

Kid Gloves

While moderately obscure, Kid Gloves might be recognized as one of the first projects of Millennium Interactive. Another UK developer that didn't make a huge splash on the other side of the pond, they were partly responsible for unleashing James Pond and his piscine punnery on the world (along with co-creator Vectordean) and the first game in the googly-eyed monster-raising Creatures franchise. They've made a whole bunch of other semi-forgotten Atari ST and Amiga games too, at least one of which I've earmarked for later.

There's not a whole lot to say about Kid Gloves that won't be expounded upon when the screenshots show up, but it's essentially a platformer with a series of single-screen stages - ten per world. You start at the left side of each stage and the goal is to leave the screen by the right side: you can revisit previous areas by simply walking back left again, and there's often good (though rarely necessary) reasons for doing so. Kid Gloves also loves to troll you: it's very much a trial-and-error sort of game, where knowing what's coming can be instrumental to one's survival. I never personally beat this game, at least without cheating, but I did have a Super Meat Boy-like fascination with it for a while. That phenomenon where an obstinate player refuses to let a game, especially a colossal jerk of a game, get the better of them. If I had any anger management issues I was aware of this game would've been the cause of them.

Welcome to Kid Gloves! It's literally about a kid with some magic gloves. That's all the premise you needed in 1990.You're the wiener in the cap. Most of the rest of this screen is fairly self-explanatory except for the vine: rather than being a ladder, it's actually a barrier. Rather than a standard wall, barriers can be removed with keys. The game's all about managing your key supply and using them wisely.Whenever you start a new game, the first item of any item type you pick up will give you this little pause screen pro-tip. The game's not absurdly complicated, but it's the sort of nice touch that modern games would start adopting rather than assuming everyone's read the manual beforehand. They're a super quick form of tutorial too: a second or two to read 'em, and then they're gone.So the most pertinent feature of this game is how the screen's state changes the longer you stay in it. Enemies will simply materialize out of nowhere in a set order depending on a hidden timer. There's usually half a dozen of these timed appearances per screen, and most of them are designed to throw your game off. We're talking invincible enemies to hurry you up, fast-moving enemies that instantly appear on the platform you're on and other cases where the game will just decide to make the careful jumping puzzles more difficult than they already were. So many games of this era are cruelly designed, but Kid Gloves borders on vindictive.This floating eyeball, for instance, will appear about ten seconds after entering this screen, around the time you're contemplating which of these barriers to unlock. You might've noticed that those gradient-fill blocks have moved: those will fall as soon as you touch them. Blocks like that are often useful for building bridges, but they are fatal if you're anywhere near them while they're falling.The bottom route out of the previous screen gives you this little bonus area with money and a key to replace the one you used to get here. Despite being a single-screen game, the ten screens of each world are all connected and feed back into each other on occasion. I'll have to return to screen 2 to continue. More falling blocks, this time blocking the way forward. Some more power-up talk: fruits are score items and not worth the trouble. Cash is needed for the game's shops, and tend to be harder to reach. Smart bombs are rare and can clear the screen of any enemies. Ankhs are extra life items, but you need four to gain one more life.These ladder climbing goons are adorable. They'll go up and down the ladders, stopping to clap every time they reach the end. The anaconda is less adorable, but only by a little bit. I'll explain another exploitable quirk of the game: while the timer resets every time you leave a screen and come back, the enemies you've killed remain dead for the entire game UNLESS you happen to die while on that screen. What you can do, therefore, is kill an enemy and the leave the screen and come back: not only does that enemy stay dead, but you've now got fewer obstacles between you and the next screen. If you know something horrible is going to warp in if you stick around too long, it's a good plan to carefully eliminate problems and then leave/return to have their deaths "stick".Like for instance on this screen, those two invincible Lil' Sparky things will appear and move in a Z formation, making it hard to go up and down these ladders while they're zipping back and forth. By removing the snake and the two clapping cavemen, I can move through this screen quickly enough to never have to deal with them.And just to show off what happens if anything hostile touches you: you melt into a bloody skeleton and leave nothing but your cap behind, which falls to the bottom of the screen. In one of the game's few voice clips, the kid will say "oh no!" before spontaneously combusting. Traumatizing.Penelope Cruz here is the shopkeeper. Shops are generally few and far between and give you an opportunity to spend all the money you've been accruing. The items along the top are useful one-shot items, including extra keys. It's always a good idea to have an extra key handy, as sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where you've run out and can't get past a barrier. The items along the bottom are new weapons and very expensive: the idea being that you save up your cash by ignoring the one-shot stuff. New weapons are not easier to predict than the default bouncing coin, but they do more damage as well.This screen is completely devoid of enemies when you enter it, but then about four warp in after a few seconds. They're meant to trip you up if you're heading to the shop.Oops!After every ten stages the game warps you through time and space to another location. It's just an excuse to throw in a bunch of different settings.This gladiator guy cracks me up. He looks like he's posing behind one of those cutouts you see in theme parks.Sure are a lot of dudes in togas for this Ancient Egypt level. I suppose they never say how ancient it is. Anyway, this is a massive three-barrier door here, which means you need to be on-point with your key gathering to get past it. Or you can take the bottom route, which saves a key and gives you an extra one besides. Choosing which route to take is often crucially important, and Kid Gloves is definitely the sort of game that would be happy to trap you in an unwinnable situation.I forgot how much I liked this puzzle. The falling ibis blocks can trap these up-and-down scrolling yashichi things, allowing you to walk over them and grab that key on the left. You then have to exit the screen and come back, which resets falling blocks, to move on.Enemy placement isn't the only thing affected by the timer. There's an impassable wall up here that will eventually disappear if you spend enough time on the screen. Of course, enemies will also continue to warp in while you're patiently waiting.Oops!The ice age was really purple, apparently. I'd better stop now before I screencap the whole game.

Kid Gloves is still as diabolical as ever, though its malice was lessened somewhat by the infinite lives this cracked version of the game was kind enough to bestow. Still, that just meant I was able to show you as far as screen 21: I usually reach the game over screen before the end of the first world. As well as the game's penchant for dropping enemies directly on top of you without warning, it's also punishingly precise: falling blocks and instant-death traps (like the flames) take up a lot more room than they would appear, and it's easy to clip one of their invisible edges and die. Likewise, ladders require that you line yourself up pixel-perfectly before you're allowed to climb them, and when time is nearly always of the essence that pixel precision is something you don't need. They feel more like rookie errors than deliberate game design decisions to make an already impossible game more so, but then this was the studio's first project. Their later games, like the aforementioned James Pond, are marginally better about sprite collision and other mechanical concerns.