GYSHP: Glover

Like last week’s Games You Should Have Played, this is another great game from the 5th generation of gaming consoles (N64/PS1, Sega Saturn, etc), otherwise known as “The best time to ever play a video game in the whole history of gaming”.

For today’s trip into the past, we’re going to talk a little bit about a game called Glover.

Glover is another platformer with an interesting concept. Instead of the typical “You play as a dude who has to jump around and climb obstacles” you see in typical platformers, there is no “dude” to play as. Instead, you play as a four-fingered glove. And you have a toy ball. And you do things with that ball that you would never do wearing a glove.

The story to Glover is really goofy and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It starts with a Wizard, wearing gloves. While he’s making a magic potion to do… something, things a’splode and his gloves fly off his hand, much like Jake Brown’s shoes.

One glove flies out the window and goes crashing into the fields, and the other glove falls into the magic potion and comes up deformed and now has an evil demeanor.

Wait, why does that sound familiar?

Oh. Yeah.

Anyway, during the explosion, a bunch of magic crystals that were previously attached to the wizard’s castle got knocked away into faraway lands, and for some reason this is bad. Luckily, you’re a wizard’s glove, so you turn the crystals into balls before they hit the ground and shatter. Because apparently you can turn crystals into balls like it ain’t no thang but you can’t magically put them back where they belong.

Also, the wizard is turned to stone while all of this is going on. Otherwise he’d surely fix things all by himself.

At any rate, your job is to do the highly predictable and stop your evil twin from destroying the world, and to do so you need to collect those crystals and put them back in their place. This involves a pretty mediocre task of traversing strangely-themed worlds and playing a long game of hide and seek.

The way Glover plays, however, is what made the game unique. You’re a glove, and you run around kinda like when you do that thing with your index and middle finger to make them look like walking legs.

The primary way you go about doing anything in the world of Glover is with a ball. The ball is typically a rubber ball with a star, but you can pick up powerups to change it into other balls, each with unique traits. For example, your rubber ball is a piece of shit that can be destroyed, but it’s relatively bouncy. Or you could turn that sumbitch into a bowling ball, which doesn’t bounce and is damn hard to destroy.

The way you interact with this ball, aside from rolling the ball gently across a smooth terrain, varies depending on the situation. Sometimes it’s going to be better to bounce your ball to reach higher areas. You can slap your ball to get it (but not you) across a gap. You can also use two fingers atop your ball to roll about with extra agility, but to quickly get things done it’s best to just cup the ball in your hand and glide around.

One of the aspects that you should really appreciate about this game is that there is a seemingly endless amount of things to find and do. To complete everything, you have to collect all the “Garibs”, which are your typical useless, collectible doodad that you have to find a bajillion of in any platformer title. These are hidden all over the place in the levels, many in places that you will never find until you happen to accidentally focus your camera behind a certain object and see some.

This is one of those games that will easily take you several weeks to do a 100% completion of, assuming you’re not using a guide of some sort. The exploration in this game is immense, and in many cases requires a lot of backtracking to previous levels.

Speaking of the levels, Glover is guilty of one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to platformers, and that’s the stereotypical, single-themed levels. Glover features a slightly unimpressive six different areas (however, the levels are quite large and broken up into multiple areas, so there’s always exploration a-plenty), and the themes are very bland. Water level, space level, scary level, etc. While the level design is definitely not the most imaginative, the design of the levels works out really well, simply due to the fact that you’ll easily spend hours traversing each world.

One of my favorite parts of this game, however, is the cheat codes. You know, cheat codes? Yeah, this is back in the day when developers would put little things like that into a game for you to, you  know, have fun with the game, as opposed to these days where you’re banned from ever playing again if you cheat.

The cheat codes weren’t just goofy things like “Big Head Mode” (which will be sorely missed) or change your costume like a lot of other games have done. These were real cheats. The cheats would change the display of the game to look like you’re using a fish-eye lens (in fact, a good handful of the cheats would tilt/turn the camera into all sorts of crazy modes, which made it damn near impossible to play), give you special powers to kill enemies just by pointing your finger at them, even give you a special type of ball to use, which is entirely unobtainable without use of the cheat.

It’s obvious that the developers of Glover took the game seriously enough to not take it seriously at all. Which is perfect and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The biggest selling point for Glover is that, despite it’s childish appearance and storytelling, this game is 100% fun to play. I go back and play this game any time I end up busting out the N64 for any reason.

Hasbro, the producers of this game, were once announcing a sequel, Glover 2. However, like many of the underrated platformer titles back in the aforementioned golden age of gaming, the production ceased due to lack of popularity. Canceling projects like Glover 2, however, makes it entirely unsurprising that Hasbro Interactive only lasted six years.

For my closing statement; if nothing so far has convinced you to play this game, keep in mind that the commercial for the game blatantly bashes Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider, and Duke Nukem in under 30 seconds.