[Retro-Videogames] Bilbo Finally Joins Gandalf & the Dwarves | The Hobbit (GBA) #2

yesterday

Hi, what's up geek fellas?, I hope you are all doing well. Welcome to my second post about The Hobbit for the game boy advance. This will be a Retro-gaming blog where I tell you how Bilbo finally joins to Gandalf and the dwarves in the adventure of his life :)

Tech note: For this gaming blog I'd been using the emulator Visual Boy Advance M-64 (64 bits).

The Hobbit for Game Boy Advance (Synopsis).

On 24 October 2003, developers Saffire brought us The Hobbit for the Game Boy Advance, a videogame based on J.R.R. Tolkien's wonderful literary work of the same name. This videogame was published under the protection of the then very famous company: Sierra Entertainment. The Hobbit is an action-adventure videogame with an isometric view, in which the player controls the main character of Tolkien's literary work, Bilbo Baggins, and in which we will explore the story of The Hobbit with sufficient fidelity to the book, but with some variations in the story, such as the existence of characters that do not exist in the original work from which this videogame is inspired. Combat is hack and slash style, where we can manage our equipment and items through a very well-designed inventory.

After Bilbo's meeting with the dwarves and Gandalf has been completed, we awake in our room, and on our way out we meet Gandalf the Grey, who tells us that the dwarves are waiting for us at the Green Dragon Inn, and that we must hurry to join the party and leave the Shire as soon as possible.

Even if we have already done it before, it is time to repeat the same evasive action with the dog through the stealth system offered by the hobbit in order to get out of the residential area of Shire and head towards the Green Dragon Inn.

Note: One exploit I discovered at this early stage in the game is this: it turns out that in the garden of the hobbit who asked us to help him with the vermin, you can go back and blow up all the vases as many times as you like to get an unlimited number of tokens... which, if you have the patience to repeat the process several times, can be quite useful later on.

Here is a very striking feature of this video game, which is the ability to equip yourself with two offensive objects, for example you can equip yourself as in this case with the firecrackers for the b-button and the walking-stick for the L-button, i.e. you can attack with two different types of weapons.

And in true Super Mario Bros 3 style, we start carrying stone blocks that we find in The Lone Lands to throw them at the giant wasps and rats that roam this area of Middle-earth.

Keep an eye out for these blocks of stone, as you can find apples, firecrackers and tokens underneath them, and in the case of the apples, these are used to restore 3 life points.

Exploration is something that is very well rewarded in this game, which we feel is very much in line with Tolkien's concept of Middle-earth.

The walking-stick is very effective against rats and giant wasps, as it has a very good range, allowing us to make attacks from a relatively safe distance and minimise the damage we could take during any encounter with these creatures.

The game presents us with a semi-open world in which, if we are attentive, we will have no difficulty in finding the path to follow, as the linearity of the story is maintained at the most of the times.

After defeating a host of harmful creatures of Middle-earth, we entered a cave that stood between the dwarves and Bilbo Baggins.

Inside the cave we find more dangerous creatures, most notably giant bats that are quite difficult to hit because they move so erratically and quickly. As you can see, these creatures reduced me a good amount of health points, as they attacked in a group. But one thing to note is the mistake we made by not using the walking-stick special attack, which would have prevented the loss of so many life points :/

Once we had cleared the cave of all evil creatures, we had to solve a puzzle in order to move on. This puzzle consisted of cleverly arranging a series of stones on an outline on the floor of the cave to activate a sort of wooden wall that would allow us to climb up and out of the cave.

Here we can see the walking stick special attack that we've mentioned before, this special attack is very useful against multiple enemies because it makes a round attack that hits all the enemies that surround us. This special movement can kill a giant wasp in one single punch.

Finally, and after a good introduction to fighting all sorts of beasts of Middle-earth, we meet the dwarves again as we leave the cave, where they ask us to use our hobbit skills to find a way through a series of ruins that are blocking their path, and to clear the way and continue with the planned missions.

Hey, I just wanna say 'thank you very much' for giving me some of your time and read this post. For sure I'll continue bringing more Hobbit for GBA content as soon as possible.

See you later.