Punch-Out!! (Wii Review)

April 4, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Punch-Out!!
aka Punch-Out!! Wii or Wii Punch-Out!!
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Released May 18, 2009
Directed by Jason Carr and Mike Inglehart
Developed by Next Level Games
Published by Nintendo
Utilizes Wii Remote Motion Controls & Wii Balance Board (Both Optional)
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing at Punch-Out!! Wiki

*Since I get a lot of questions about the status line on games, “NO MODERN RELEASE” means “you can’t get it for current platforms.” For my older readers, they consider anything released in this century to be “modern.” I don’t. The Wii is now the fourth newest game console from Nintendo and turns 20 this year. For Nintendo-published games, anything that isn’t available on Switch or Switch 2 will get either “NO MODERN RELEASE” or the heartbreaking “NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED” tags.

Hey, I thought he was throwing a headbutt! A slow, feeble headbutt! Cross my heart and hope to die!

Back in January, I reviewed all the Punch-Out!! games but this one because they’re some of my favorite games ever. I don’t know where Punch-Out!! for Nintendo Wii ranks among the best games I’ve ever played, but I’ll cherish what happened as a result of the above picture for the rest of my life. Simply put, Punch-Out!! broke my father, who broke me, and then we broke our whole family. Broke-broke, to the point that, as it was happening, at least part of me thought “oh God, I hope Dad doesn’t die!” No joke, I specifically remember hearing in my head “I hope Dad doesn’t die.” Dad was watching me while I was trying to figure out the solutions to the post game special challenges without using a guide because they’re basically puzzles played in split-second intervals. I started the fifth fight, which was against Piston Hondo. Hondo bowed to me in an unusual display of sportsmanship for the Punch-Out!! franchise and, having no honor myself, I responded by nailing him with a two star uppercut that sent him immediately to the canvas. And that’s when it happened.

Oh God, that face on Mac. Oh God. I’m still laughing thinking about this. Oh God. Good times.

I heard what sounded like a horse whinny and I turned my head to see my father shutting his eyes and covering his face with both his hands. I hadn’t won the fight so I turned back to the screen, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father lay his head down on the coffee table like he’s covering up. I think he’s exaggerating his shame that his daughter would gleefully respond to sportsmanship with unsportsmanlike conduct. Then he starts to slowly slap his hand on the table and I look over at him. He raises his head up and tears are pouring down his cheeks and he’s trying to catch his breath from laughing so hard and he starts pointing at me and the TV, and he’s changing colors, I swear to God he actually changed colors. He tries to talk but instead starts this visceral laugh like it hurts while pointing at the TV over and over. I later found out he was TRYING to say “that’s so f*cked up” but it sounds like someone is knocking the wind out of him every time a coherent syllable escapes his mouth and then he just explodes into laughter. The laughing spreads to me, the game gets paused, and he and I have laughing seizures for the next several minutes as we both slowly plop to the floor.

Punch-Out!! for Wii really is one of the more, how shall I say, “demented” games Nintendo has ever published. It’s silly and I can also understand why people would find some of the characters to be offensive, but I admit I laughed out loud at moments like Ball Bull throwing a dumbbell into a crowd or Bear Hugger’s pet squirrel. Dad almost lost it equally as bad when he saw Bear Hugger’s squirrel go flying limply into the audience where, presumably, some very lucky fan went home with a one-of-a-kind souvenir.

People walking into the room start laughing at our laughing without any clue what prompted this, and Dad keeps pointing at the TV like he wants to explain, but he just goes back to hysterical crying laughing, and meanwhile, I’m now worse off than him. When I laugh like this, pulled muscles are known to happen, but I can’t stop and neither can he. We both shoot well past the threshold of acceptable laughter and are now laughing at the fact that we can’t stop laughing, which I’m convinced if you can die laughing, that’s where it happens. It finally starts to settle down with us having ensnared basically the whole family into this, then my mother asks “what the hell happened?” I start to explain it but halfway through my explanation, Dad cracks again and it starts anew. I had to restart to show everyone what happened, only I’m still laughing so hard that my timing isn’t good enough to get the stars to do the uppercut. I’m trying to calm everyone down, but Dad cracks as soon as Hondo bows, squeaking out “why would you do that in a fight in this f*cking federation?” Finally I hit the damn uppercut when he bowed and Dad lost it AGAIN with a glass-shattering high pitched laugh that made me legitimately fear he was going to have a heart attack. Nobody is really laughing at Punch-Out except Dad. We’re laughing that he can’t stop laughing, and then he goes back to covering his face with a crying laugh as he kept pointing over and over to the screen and muttering “that is so f*cked up! That is SO f*cked up! They put that in the game! That’s so f*cked up!”

My Dad’s going to be 77 this year. When your parents reach a certain age, you realize that five years, ten years, even twenty five years if you’re insanely lucky goes by so quickly, so enjoy it now because the day is coming where you don’t get to anymore. I don’t know what the context about this story says about our family (“probably nothing good” Angela said, also laughing) but I suspect that I will treasure my memory of almost killing my father with Punch-Out!! for the rest of my life, a sentence that sounds less innocent the more I read it back.

I’ve seen this episode of the Simpsons. It didn’t end well for Ken Griffey Jr.

So yeah, Punch-Out!! for Wii holds up AND it’s completely bonkers in a way you don’t expect from Nintendo-produced games. There’s certainly a debate on whether cultural depictions like those seen in Punch-Out!! Wii belongs in gaming or any media, and I’ll leave that to scholars on the topic. It does make for a fascinating look at how you directly remake an 8-bit game when restrictions on the overall presentation and specifically elements like animation and character models are removed. Because from a gameplay perspective, Wii Punch-Out!! is almost exactly the same as the 8-bit game. If it was hypothetically impossible to do 3D games on Wii, Punch-Out!! would still be the same game. It’s as retro as it gets, unless you count the Wii Fit Balance Board or Wii Motion Controls. I didn’t use those. The only plans I have for a wacky controller involve a USB to GameCube adapter and a plastic bongo I still have from my GameCube days. Hint hint.

It sure seems like even Disco Kid isn’t entirely original. Though they never outright say it, it’s pretty clear that Disco Kid was penciled in at some point to be Kid Quick from the original coin-op, only reimagined for 2009. Kid Quick was a very generic boxer and arguably the most flavorless character in the entire franchise (Pizza Pasta is too, besides his memorable name). They come from the same city, share the same weight, have “Kid” in the name and all the data for him in the game is filed under “kidquick.” But, since he’s functionally a new character either way, he’s the only original character in Punch-Out!!, unless you count Donkey Kong.

Not only is the gameplay old school, but the actual content is often copied straight from the original NES Punch-Out!! You see it right from the first fight, where you can use the same attack pattern to defeat the same Glass Joe as you did in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! way back when. With the exceptions of Disco Kid (wink, see above) and Donkey Kong, who is hidden VERY deep in the game, there’s literally no new characters in Punch-Out!! for Wii. With the exception of Mr. Dream/Mike Tyson, all the NES characters are here along with two SNES fighters. Are you pissed that Mike Tyson isn’t in the game, or even anything resembling the “Dream Fight?” Well, you must not have played through the title defense fights, because the second Mr. Sandman fight is a direct homage to the Tyson fight, with minimally animated uppercuts and he even closes one eye before throwing his jabs, just like Iron Mike did in the NES game. It’s a no-doubt-about-it tribute to the Dream Fight.

Let me get this bit out of the way early: yes, I played Doc Louis’ Punch-Out!!, the WiiWare release that was originally a Club Nintendo bonus that was then briefly sold in the weeks leading to the Wii’s eShop closing. I thought it was terrible. There’s three different versions of the same fight, with the only notable quirk happening the third fight, where Doc can actually get a star on you and throw a one-punch knockdown. I would rank Doc Louis’ fights 28th (3rd fight) 29th (2nd fight) and 30th (1st fight) out of thirty total fights Punch-Out!! Wii offers overall. According to Nintendo, this was “designed exclusively for 2009 Club Nintendo Platinum Members (USA and Canada) as a free download.” But I think it’s more likely this was designed to be part of the tutorial that they realized was unnecessary given how well done the first three fights are at educating players and cutting it for space. That or this was meant to be post-game content that, again, is unneeded when they already have premium post-game content via Title Defense and the challenges. IF Punch-Out!! gets a re-release, obviously they should include this because no content should be out of reach in the modern era. BUT, if they don’t include it, it’s nothing to cry over because these really are some of the worst Punch-Out fights in the franchise.

The most important change to the Punch-Out!! format is that each fighter is wholly unique in their attack timing and animations. To recap: every past Punch-Out!! game used palette swapping to save cartridge space, so while the NES game had eleven fighters, there were only six total bodies (with King Hippo being the odd-man out) that shared the same attack animations. In theory, that meant you could get a feel for the timing of a future fighter from their clone. So, for example, Glass Joe’s jabs come at roughly the same speed Don Flamenco will eventually throw them, and Super Macho Man’s big uppercuts you’ve already experienced from Soda Popinski. Personally, *I* always bought the magic trick and felt they were unique characters with their own unique timing to each move, but upon focusing on it as a game critic, yeah, it’s like learning how the magician saws the woman in half and I could see the timing was identical. Well, all of that is out the window now. ALL fourteen opponents have a one-of-a-kind model and different styles of punching. As in literally every punch thrown by every fighter has unique animation and timing. Outstanding.

I thought FOR SURE King Hippo and Bear Hugger must share assets, but even that isn’t the case. They each have their own unique model.

I made sure to pay extra close attention to former palette swaps to see if those fights still felt similar, and I suspect Next Level Games anticipated players would do just that. I noticed that most of the fights that didn’t feel like remakes of the NES fights were the former palette swapped second fights. What I mean is that the Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, Bald Bull, and Soda Popinski bouts feel like direct remakes of their NES counterparts with some slight alterations and updates, while Don Flamenco, Great Tiger, Super Macho Man, and Mr. Sandman feel “inspired” by the NES game but clearly aim to be much different fights outside signature moments. Great Tiger’s teleporting attack is here BUT also radically changed in both the presentation and execution. Sandman still does his triple uppercut combo, but he no longer spins his hands like Bald Bull for standard punches and instead throws these sledgehammer-like clubbing punches that are completely unique to any other fight the franchise has ever done.

The two SNES fighters are probably the most changed overall. Functionally, Aran Ryan might as well be a new character with his hyperactive fighting style that makes him seem like a tweaker. As ridiculous as this sounds, in both the first playthrough (“Contender” fights) and the rematches (“Title Defense” fights), the character that beat me the most was, in fact, Aran Ryan.

The effort to give each fighter their own unique vibe takes the edge off the game only having a measly fourteen fighters. Apparently Next Level Games agreed with me that the SNES game’s roster was weak sauce because only two fighters from it made the journey to Wii: Bear Hugger and Aran Ryan. I think Dragon Chan and Hoy Quarlow got hosed, but otherwise, good calls on the roster decisions. The gameplay leans much harder into interrupting-style counter punches. Characters flash red when they’re about to throw a punch, and if your timing is true, you can nab a star if you smack them correctly. But, if your timing is slightly off, that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t land a punch. You just won’t get the star for it. Punch-Out!!’s strict time windows are probably the most frustrating aspect for me because some of them are so anal about it. In later fights, you practically have to be frame-perfect to earn some of the stars, or to score instant knockdowns/knockouts during key moments. Thankfully, the violence is still as impactful as ever. The star punches are back, only this time, you don’t stockpile them. Having two or three stars increases the power of the uppercut, but once you throw it, it’s gone.

The title defense against Glass Joe features him mocking you after a minute, and you automatically win the match if you hit an uppercut when he moves forward. Except, there seems to be a very, very small window where that actually works and I needed over a dozen attempts to score the challenge medal for it.

Like any other game in the series, the biggest problem Punch-Out!! has is that, once you know the patterns of the fighters, all that’s left is shaving milliseconds off your best times. Luckily for me, I only played through Punch-Out!! once, when it first released, so I wouldn’t have to go off memory of how much I loved the experience like I did with Super Punch-Out!! And frankly, even if I had, this is the biggest Punch-Out!! ever. Like, by far. That’s because once you “beat” the game, you’re not even close to seeing all the content. You have to fight everyone again, only the rematches are (usually) a step above a remix. Oh, some absolutely are glorified remixes. Piston Hondo and especially Soda Popinski felt like slightly modified versions of their original fights. I kept waiting for Soda II to do something unexpected, but it never happened and I won the fight on my first attempt. I’m pretty sure that happened back in 2009 as well. He could have been the first fighter in title defense because he was a total cinch to beat. As for everyone else? Well………

That is a horseshoe-stuffed boxing glove attached to a rope. Serious question: if this is allowed in the Punch-Out!! universe, why not just bring a gun to the ring? Well, I guess they have to save something for the sequel that will never happen.

How good are these fights? When I first played Glass Joe II back in 2009, I lost. And guess what? I lost again to him in 2026. He has a helmet that prevents you from hitting him in the head, and suddenly he knows how to throw a punch. Von Kaiser can now throw this hard-to-time one punch knockdown attack. King Hippo literally has a manhole taped to his vulnerable belly. And, again, eventually Mr. Sandman turns into Mike Tyson 2.0. If Punch-Out!! was too easy the first go around, it sure isn’t during the Title Defense run. And Punch-Out STILL isn’t over, as you’re given this ridiculous “Mac’s Last Stand” sequence where winning ten times against apparently random opponents (I fought Glass Joe twice during this sequence) without losing three times nets you the game’s true ending. Oh, and during that sequence, the fourteenth fighter, Donkey Kong, will show up at some random point.

Originally, the plan was for Princess Peach to be the surprise guest boxer, presumably after they’d run out of stereotypes and caricatures to beat up and all that was left was women, at least until someone at Next Level Games raised their hand and said “f*cking really? F*CKING REALLY?” At least that’s how I imagine it.

I loved the unorthodox Donkey Kong fight. What I didn’t love was that he just shows up without any warning or pomp. He’s the only fighter that doesn’t get an intro and it’s so jarring. “Look, it’s Donkey Kong! FIGHT!” The whole “Mac’s Last Stand” thing is just about the most anticlimactic wet fart of a finale they could have stapled onto the end of the game. Having Donkey Kong show up at literal random is bad enough, but the fact that he CAN show up proves why the whole thing doesn’t work. If you want to do this type of surprise, you need at least half the ten fighters to be these unexpected Nintendo guests. One out of ten, fought in random order, is dumb. For me, he didn’t show up until the fourth fight after I fought Glass Joe, Bear Hugger, and Bald Bull. Since these fights are now unchanged from the title defense, and since the game doesn’t tease Donkey Kong’s existence at all, I really thought this was the low point for the game and something that should have been killed on the drawing board. What SHOULD have happened is you beat Mr. Sandman II and a parody of the “GET READY FOR THE DREAM FIGHT” thing from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! happens to make people think maybe Mike Tyson really is in the game, and then bam, Donkey Kong.

I’m not the biggest fan of Next Level Games, so I can’t imagine they’ve ever made a better game than Punch-Out!! Things like the misguided last stand mode are a reminder that they’re their own worst enemies, as they sacrificed what could have been a historically memorable reveal in service to a half-assed grand finale. I do think they have talent. You can’t luck into a game this good even with a foolproof template like Punch-Out!! But like the Mario Strikers games are all, in my opinion, “mid” as the kids say and their Marvel games I thought were atrocious. I’ll be curious to see if the Nintendo ownership changes their tendency to not put the brakes on bad ideas going forward.

Okay, so the whole Donkey Kong thing is nit-picky since everything before Mac’s Last Stand is sublime. Punch-Out!! really is the perfect remake of the format. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, and that’s fine, because the formula for Punch-Out!! is timeless and perfect as it is. I don’t care if the game will eventually reach the point where all the excitement is lost once you have the “solutions” to the fights memorized and drilled into your muscle memory, because no game in the franchise is going to take longer to figure that out than the Wii game. I already played this all the way through in 2009 and I still got over twenty solid hours of gameplay in this 2026 session. I didn’t use a guide and it took me quite a while to figure out how to do things like how to TKO Disco Kid in only six punches. Everyone calls Punch-Out!! games “puzzlers” but only the Wii game genuinely leans into that. It’s something the game doesn’t even try to hide, because after you’ve done the entire main mode, there’s also the exhibition mode. While there’s no time trials outside your fastest time for each fight, there are three special challenges for each fight. Some of those medals are based around the quick knockdowns/knockouts hidden in each fight. Once you know how many total punches the quickest method requires, it’s SO fun to play and replay the fights trying to figure out where they’re at. Other challenges are like the type of novelty ideas players had already invented to keep past Punch-Out!! games alive post-game, like only using one type of punch to win a fight, IE “TKO Great Tiger using only right jabs.” And they’re fun!

Some fighters can have all the medals done in a single fight, while others require multiple matches to get them all. Oh, and Glass Joe’s requires you to f*cking lose to him by decision while still getting three knockdowns. I hate that because, even though it’s exhibition mode, the loss is counted on your profile.

The sheer amount of content added to Punch-Out!! to stretch out the total playtime in the package is insane. Two versions of each fight (except Donkey Kong) totaling twenty-seven fights, and then eighty-one extra challenges on top of that. When it was over, I still wanted more. Of course I did! When gameplay is this fun and this rewarding, I’m always going to wish that there were more characters. Other than a Super Punch-Out!!-like leaderboard for fight times, I have to admit that all the content included in Punch-Out!! is stretched to the absolute limits. Hell, I didn’t even like the two player mode (nobody really did), and I’m still walking away thinking I might never play a modern-graphics tribute to 8-bit gaming that does a better job than Punch-Out!! As much as I’m not a fan of Next Level Games, you know what? They can lay claim to being the studio behind one of my favorite games EVER. I don’t know if I like it MORE than the NES game. Again, my loyalty is to the formula. But since they stuck to that formula, it’s impossible to not like it. What frustrates me is that Next Level Games believes that Punch-Out!! as a concept has been wrung completely dry and has nothing left to offer, hence the lack of sequels or follow-ups in the last seventeen years. Well, if the studio behind Spider-Man: Friend or Foe said it, it must be true.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Doc Louis's Punch-Out!!, Punch-Out for Wii, Punch-Out!!, Punch-Out!! 2009, Punch-Out!! Franchise, Punch-Out!! remake, Punch-Out!! Review, Punch-Out!! Wii, Punch-Out!! Wii Review

K. C.’s Krazy Chase! (Magnavox Odyssey 2 Review)

March 30, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

K. C.’s Krazy Chase!
aka Crazy Chase (EU) Come-Come (South America)
Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2
Released September, 1982
Designed by Ed Averett
Developed by Magnavox
Included KC Returns (Windows, Delisted?)
Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

Ahhh. That’s the good stuff.

Well, I promised the sequel to K. C. Munchkin, and it’s not like this review was a chore. All the controversy with the original game led to this superior sequel that could never be mistaken for Pac-Man. It’s nothing short of tragic that K. C.’s Krazy Chase was a one-and-done. It was packed in KC Returns! for Windows in 2020, but I couldn’t find it, and it doesn’t matter because it’s not the type of wide release that gives a game its due. Since a stand alone Odyssey 2 collection is highly unlikely, ideally this would be a +1 in Atari 50 DLC, especially since this is the best shot Magnavox ever took at Atari. Maze chases were THE genre of gaming when this came out and Krazy Chase stands tall against even coin-ops of the era, let alone home games. I’ve never played anything like it.

Part of me wonders if they had animated K. C. in the first game like he’s animated in this game if it would have severely undermined the Atari lawsuit. In the first game, K. C. bites even if there’s nothing in front of him, just like Pac-Man. In this game, he rolls and only eats when the situation calls for it, then winks at the camera when you eat the final segment. It’s not a nothingburger change, either. It really does make the game feel less like an attempt at riding Pac-Man coattails and gives it the feel of an earnest effort at one-upping Pac-Man.

Krazy Chase has the same basic premise of a maze and eating moving targets, so initially I wondered if this would feel like a glorified ROM hack. Nope. Instead of chasing dots, you chase a centipede that’s, well, made of dots. Krazy Chase was made at the height of Atari’s Centipede’s fame, where it was arguably the world’s second most famous video game. When I found out about the centipede, I winced a little. After the previous game’s lawsuit, it almost felt like poking a hornet’s net. I admit that I also imagined a cynical attempt to create an unofficial “Pac-Man meets Centipede.” Except, isn’t like that at all (a Konami coin-op called Jungler is exactly that and feels as cynical as I imagined). Krazy Chase remains firmly a munch-em-up maze chase.

Again with the asymmetrical mazes, which is fine.

In addition to having to avoid the centipede’s head (which can never be eaten) you have two ghosts to avoid. Only, you can’t really mistake them for Pac-Man ghosts anymore. When you chomp them, they don’t wander around until they locate the center of the maze (presumably a moment or two after locating their ass with both their hands). They spin around and are stun-locked in place for a while. If you grab another segment while this is happening, their vulnerability resets, just like in the previous game. Waves end when you eat the final segment. Meanwhile, trees appear seemingly randomly in the maze that score you one point but slow you down as you stop to eat them, an effect that lessens as the game progresses. Sort of. ALL movement speed is increased, so it’s really hard to gauge whether you’re making a net gain. This is where the Odyssey 2’s lack of power seems to cause a lot of the problems. It can’t make just the enemies faster or just you faster. It’s an all-or-nothing effect, which is a shame. I wish there could be more trees since they were the main source of the game’s challenge, and I wish the timing of how fast you eat them didn’t have to change with all the other speeds.

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

As much fun as I had with Krazy Chase, it’s full of missed chances thanks to those hardware limitations. The centipede’s head can eat its own segments if you separate them from the body by eating a center piece. As twisted as this is, there’s no incentive to try and make this happen. It’d be neat if there was some kind of special bonus for triggering this. There’s not enough chasers, and what chasers there are still aren’t very intelligent. The five mazes (no randomly generated mazes this go around) feel samey, with the exception of the fifth maze. It has a trio of u-bends that feels similar to Pac-Man and probably offered the most challenge, except the ghosts missed tons of chances to trap me. They’re just not that smart. While challenging for high scores on single mazes is still addictive thanks to the one-life system from the original game carrying over, I wish the game could shuffle between mazes. I also think the ghosts are stun-locked too long when you chomp them and I think the power pellets last too long. But, that “just one more game” addictiveness is still there and the whole experience is just damn charming.

I could have died here if the pink ghost had entered the u-bend. Instead, it went up. (shrug)

K. C.’s Krazy Chase is krazy fun, but the more I played it, the more I realized it wasn’t going to enter my rotation of classic games that I throw on when I have ten minutes to kill. It’s just short of that. Instead, I’m aching for a remake that features more intelligent enemies, bigger mazes, probably more than one caterpillar (and the ability for them to get longer, maybe by eating the trees) and more nuanced scoring. Like the original game, age makes the limitations stand out so much more. But, because this tries to be much more original, the limitations stand out more. The compromises that had to be made give Krazy Chase an undeniable “proof of concept” vibe that hurts my heart because nobody ever really got a chance to build upon it. If there were any justice in the world, THIS would have been the start of a major gaming franchise. Despite that, while I probably won’t be reviewing a ton of Odyssey 2 games at IGC, I’m happy I gave the K. C. games a chance. They’re fun. They hold up as well as you could hope for, given the limitations and circumstances. They also break my heart. I think that’s why I wanted to do this review. There’s a formula here that feels untapped, and in this era of indie games, I’m hoping a few quality developers will see this review and their wheels will start spinning.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Come Come Review, K. C. Munchkin!, K. C.'s Krazy Chase!, K. C.'s Krazy Chase! Review, KC Krazy Chase Review, Magnavox Odyssey 2

K. C. Munchkin! (Magnavox Odyssey 2 Review)

March 23, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

K. C. Munchkin!
aka Munchkin (EU) Come-Come II (South America)
Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2
Released in 1981
Designed by Ed Averett
Developed by Magnavox
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

And can I just say how damn good the Odyssey 2 Homepage is? It’s so well done. Top notch resource site for an obscure console!

Part of me is wondering if K. C. Munchkin beating Atari’s efforts to the market and triggering the lawsuit is why Pac-Man 2600 was recklessly rushed through production. I’m not saying Magnavox is to blame for Pac-Man 2600, but I do legitimately wonder if they were motivated to not be undercut by anyone else.

K.C. Munchkin was the target of one of the most famous video game lawsuits of all time. Atari owned the home video game rights to Pac-Man, but Magnavox beat their horrible port to the market by a year with the non-horrible K. C. Munchkin. It’s a game where you guide a circle with a wedge cut out of it through a maze eating dots while avoiding colorful chasers, only you can turn the tables on the chasers by eating one of the four special pellets in the maze, which allows you to eat them. If that sounds a little too close to Pac-Man, well, the courts agreed. Atari was actually rejected in their first attempt to halt sales, but eventually a judge sided with them, noting the changes made to the game actually made the intent more obvious. I don’t know if I agree with that, but whatever. What makes me sad is, it didn’t have to be this way. Games that were inspired by Pac-Man would be the dominating genre in gaming for the next five years until Super Mario Bros. turned side-scrolling platformers into the talk of the town. K. C. certainly wasn’t the only game that was riding Pac-Man’s coattails, but the real problem was how obvious Magnavox’s intent was. This included box art and an ad campaign that I’ll generously describe as “foolish” but would more accurately describe as “YOU STUPID F*CKING MORONS! WHAT HELL DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?”

Thank you once again to the Odyssey 2 Homepage. Check them out!

I mean seriously! That actually looks more like Pac-Man than Atari’s concept art for Pac-Man around this time! The funny thing is, THAT looks like cover art you would expect for K. C. Munchkin to avoid getting accused of ripping off Pac-Man (sans the shirt, of course). God, this must have been fun to be a fly on a wall for! If for no other reason, to get high on the fumes.

(nods) Yeah, that’s real. If you’ve never seen it, that was the original concept art intended for Atari’s take on Pac-Man.

Sigh. Look, I’m not winning any friends siding with an evil corporation over here but there’s no way you can look at the box art/ad and not think that they were trying to deliberately trick unknowing consumers into thinking that their game, at the bare minimum, had SOME connection to Pac-Man or maybe even was Pac-Man under a different name. It’s just too close, and the courts ultimately ruled that an idea can’t be owned, only the expression of that idea. In other words, you can’t own the idea of a maze chase, but you absolutely can own the way Pac-Man is done and presented. In that regard, Magnavox’s advertising was probably more damaging for their case than the actual game content. From the neon blue maze to the shape of the not-ghosts to the shape of the mouth and the dots. And again, it didn’t have to be this way, because the actual game of K. C. Munchkin is different enough to stand tall on its own. Like, problematic as it is (and it’s a deeply flawed game) K. C. Munchkin is a seriously compelling video game based JUST on its content that feels more like a logical evolution of the Pac-Man formula than an attempt at a clone (and I hate that term).

Adjusting to the ever-increasing speed is one of the most disorienting sensations of any maze chase I’ve played. Oh and don’t worry if the maze looks like it can’t be solved.

I’m just going to use the Pac-Man terms. Why not?

The most obvious change is the maze itself is mostly empty. There’s three ghosts instead of four, and instead of every space having a dot, there’s only twelve dots total, four which are the energizers. Oh, and the dots move, making them functionally characters themselves. The fewer the dots remaining, the faster the dots move, really putting the “chase” into “maze chase.” It creates some VERY exciting final dot scenarios. As for the power pellets, they’re like janky versions of the energizers in Pac-Man, and so are the ghosts. When they’re chomped, their Earthly remains wander the maze until returning to the center to reform. If that sounds “nearly identical” to Pac-Man, trust me, only fifteen seconds of playing will confirm it’s not. There’s a few mechanical hiccups with the energizers. The first is that they wear off quickly, and when the “frightened” period starts wearing off, the blinking ghosts can actually kill you. “Blinking” is done by alternating from the “we can be eaten” pink to their normal color and if your timing when contact is made happens when a ghost is their normal color, you die. Huh. I’ve never seen THAT before. I wish I could say it’s as charming as the rest of the game but that aspect just gets annoying.

Maybe I just sucked at this but triple chomps were super, super, super rare. As in I can count how many times I did it on one hand and I’d have a finger or two left. EDIT: Actually, this isn’t true but I was thinking of when the ghosts actually spread out. I scored plenty of doubles and triples when they were clustered-up. Sigh. It’s been a long week.

The bigger mechanical problem is that the ghosts aren’t efficient at all about returning to life. Sometimes they wander the maze for quite a while. Longer even than the ghosts that get caught in roundabouts in Jr. Pac-Man. Not only does this lessen the scoring opportunities, but it sucks the excitement out of the game. Especially when all three are knocked-out. In the above maze, when I scored a rare triple chomp very early on a fresh cycle, I was almost able to clear the other dots completely before even the first ghost came back to life, and the other two weren’t even close to the center. As if that’s not bad enough, when the ghosts DO find their home, they could linger in that center box for a while before they actually do have flesh and can move around and kill you. It’s K. C. Munchkin’s Achilles heel, because it just is so much downtime for the antagonistic part of the game.

Another problem is that the ghosts move as fast as you do even when they’re frightened, removing all potential for chase downs and requiring that chomps are done exclusively by ambushing. Really, the differences between K. C. and Pac-Man are far more numerous than what any legal judgement was based on. See kids: grown-ups ruin everything.

Possibly the most notable change is that there’s no lives system. You play until you die, and then, after a brief pause (which allows you to also input your high score name, though it does NOT wait for you to finish) the game restarts on whatever map you selected when you booted up the game. I imagine this was something that was frustrating to Pac-Man fans back in the day, but the one life format actually feels very modern and certainly enhanced my experience, making K. C. Munchkin surprisingly addictive. There’s four preset mazes (seen below, and you have to use the 0 – 3 keys for them, not 1 – 4). I thought the second maze (keypad #1) was far and away the strongest as it lent itself to the energizers more. No chase-downs means you have to ambush, and there’s more chances for that in the second layout. By the way, the final dot moves as fast as the ghosts do and thus also has to be ambushed.

Maze if you press #0

Maze if you press #1

Maze if you press #2

Maze if you press #3

The final major change that adds value the overall game is that pressing #4 at the start of a game will make the maze randomly generated. Some of these ultimately were just slight variations on the existing mazes. Others leaned heavily into my least favorite maze chase twist: missing walls. However, to the game’s credit, the controls work better for wall-free mazes since K. C. doesn’t move automatically and is capable of stopping. You actually do have to press a direction to, you know, move. The random mazes can be fun and, as long as there’s no major missing walls, I like the shapes of the mazes in general. I also like that they’re asymmetrical and have dead ends, which is a neat twist on the formula. You might have also noticed that the fourth map looks kind of impossible. Well, the ghost house portion of the maze rotates like a turnstile regardless of what level you play. In addition to the typical Pac-Man tunnels, in some configurations of maze, the only way to access each corner of the maze is to wait in the ghost house for the opening to be facing in the correct direction. I’m guessing the rotating ghost house is also what throws off the simple ghost algorithm and causes massive delays in respawning that hurts the game as badly as it does.

I should also note that the Magnavox Odyssey 2 has half the RAM as the Atari 2600, so the fact that they pulled-off such a quality game from a complex genre with a MASSIVE limitation is pretty impressive. Those limitations are likely why the game has so many bonkers quirks. The energizers don’t target just the active ghosts, but instead create a global effect that works on a strict, absolute timer regardless of when you grab the energizer. In other words, if the ghosts are dead in the center of the maze and are just about to respawn when you grab an energizer, they will respawn completely chompable until the strict energizer timer runs out. Beat a level by grabbing an energizer last? The ghosts will start the next cycle chompable for however long you have left on the (invisible) timer. When I figured that out, the triple chomps happened a lot more frequently since the ghosts tend to stay clustered together early in most (but not all) levels. It’s janky but charmingly endearing and, yes, fun. As far as games that did the most things with the least resources, K. C. is up there.

Originally this was going to be a 2 in 1 review but two things happened. The first was I pulled the typical Cathy move of telling myself to only play long enough to get what I need for the review and I overshot it by many hours. Second, I liked the sequel so much more than the original that I want it to get its own feature.

As technically limited and, at times, frustrated by those limitations as it is, I liked K.C. Munchkin. It’s good enough that it’s not very hard to imagine a child of the early 80s who had an Odyssey 2 instead of an Atari telling kids at school they got the better deal. I certainly liked it more than some of the Atari 2600 maze chase games I’ve played. Like, no joke, I would take this over 2600 Ms. Pac-Man. Really, the only one I can think of off the top of my head that I’d rather play is Jr. Pac-Man for the 2600, which I felt was maybe the best Atari 2600 title. With most 2600 maze chases, there’s a coin-op that does the same thing better, or it just doesn’t offer enough originality or twists. K. C Munchkin is different enough that saying “it’s like Pac-Man” is accurate and an injustice. I haven’t really played anything else like it, and the original concepts it brings combined with the addictive one-life structure make it hold up spiritually if not mechanically. So my first (published) Odyssey 2 review cruises to an easy YES! Yet, I’m still sad. One of my primary goals here at Indie Gamer Chick is to unearth hidden gems for people my age or younger and remind game publishers that you have so much more than the same old big name milestone games in your catalogs. But K. C. Munchkin is unlikely to ever get a re-release.

Oh Christ, there’s even Spider-Man on the Odyssey 2. Well, a prototype of a port of the Atari 2600 game. I’ll be doing more with the O2 in the near future. Watch for the review to K. C.’s Krazy Chase at IGC soon.

I wish that all the parties who own the legacies of these gaming devices could come together and make a deal and put the two K. C. Munchkin games in a modern retro set. Like, shove them in as a bonus feature in Atari 50 DLC based around the actual software and hardware that went head-to-head with Atari. Interview the parties involved and have a laugh over it and offer a toast to the actual unique gameplay merits of K. C. Munchkin. There’s plenty. Besides, K. C. Munchkin did make history. Not the kind of history it hoped for maybe, but history nonetheless. The real victim of this is designer Ed Averett. I’m sure he was given orders by higher ups to make “their Pac-Man” and so maybe in a roundabout way he gets tagged with being the guy “who ripped” off Pac-Man. Except, he didn’t. He built upon it, like so many developers of the era did. What he accomplished with so little hardware (heh, just wait until you see what the same designer did with the sequel. It’s AWESOME and original) is something that should be celebrated. Will K. C. Munchkin get a re-release? Probably not, but there is no better game that modern publishers could give a prestige retro re-release to prove that, yes indeed, time does heal all wounds.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with K. C. Munchkin!, K. C. Munchkin! (Magnavox Odyssey 2 Review), K. C. Munchkin! Odyssey 2, K. C. Munchkin! Odyssey 2 Review, K. C. Munchkin! review, KC Munchkin, KC Munchkin review, Magnavox Odyssey 2, Odyssey 2

Nuts & Milk (Famicom Review) Includes Bonus Reviews of Nuts & Milk ROM Hacks

March 13, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Nuts & Milk
Platform: Famicom
Released July 20, 1984
Designed by Kikuta Masaaki
Developed by Hudson Soft
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE

“What about Nuts & Milk or Road Avenger and stuff… still nothing…? Speed up the update pace, will ya… I’m payin’ decent money for this…”
Hideki Kamiya (March 4, 2026), Director of Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry, on the lackluster Switch Online library updates.

Well, now I have to do one of those, so I flipped a coin and Nuts & Milk won.

For this review, I barely sampled the A mode before switching over to the very challenging but quite satisfying B mode. I recommend that for veterans.

You might not have heard of Nuts & Milk, but it’s one of the most historically significant games ever made. Alongside Hudson Soft’s port of Lode Runner, also released on July 20, 1984, it was the very first third party published game released on a Nintendo platform and Hudson Soft’s first console game. Had I not known that fact or anything else about it, I would have sworn this was an unreleased port of an unreleased Nintendo coin-op. It has the look of one. It has the feel of one. It has the personality of one. It even has a similar title screen with A and B games.

It’s so convincing that I’m actually more than a little surprised that Nintendo didn’t option this for a US release themselves as a black box title. It’s certainly good enough.

Seriously, remove the (c) 1984 Hudson Soft part of that screen and you would swear this is a first party Nintendo game, and one that slots in perfectly next to Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, and Mario Bros. Obviously Hudson Soft knew their target audience, a fact that’s even more apparent when you find out that the original PC Nuts & Milk, released in 1983/84 was an entirely different style game. That original game is a top-down maze chase similar to Mr. Do. You tunnel your way to fruit while avoiding enemies who always walk clockwise around the playfield. Going into this feature, I intended to review both versions of Nuts & Milk. But, that would actually require playing the MSX game for more than a couple minutes, and I didn’t want to. It’s boring.

(Nuts & Milk for MSX) Oof. Horrible.

Instead of porting THAT version of Nuts & Milk, Hudson Soft rebuilt the entire game. They kept the base concept of playing as the heroic Milk who must avoid the villainous Nuts, with the object being to collect all the fruit which will then open up the exit. However, since Nintendo-style 2D arcaders were the main draw of the Famicom in the days before Super Mario, Hudson reworked the entire game to be more like that. Although Nuts & Milk is still a maze chase, it’s now also a platformer played from a side view, with jumping and much more complicated rules that just favor the player. The most valuable advantage is that Milk can move through one side of the screen and come out the other, but the chasers can’t. Also, although there is no official attack method or “turn the tables” gameplay like energizers in Pac-Man, the chasers are dumb as a rock and easy to manipulate to their doom. While the Nuts are capable of SOME platforming, they’re bad at it. Really, really bad at it.

Nuts & Milk (1984 Famicom)

But, just because they’re dumb doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. They respawn very quickly and there could be as many as three of them on a stage. If you play in the B Mode, the game adds an additional threat in the form of blimps that spawn from the left side of the screen and functionally act like fireballs that are lethal to the touch. Which is a weird choice because the bonus rounds actually DO have red and green fireballs similar to the original Mario Bros. There’s also helicopters that spawn from the right side in the B mode, and I had no idea until I was about halfway through my main play session that helicopters are actually points that you’re meant to collect. Well f*ck. And I only found that out after I held my breath and tried to jump over one. Obviously I failed, and thank God for it. Of course, this meant I had to replay the entire f*cking game to recalibrate the difficulty. Read the damn instructions, Cathy. How many times has not doing so bit you in the ass?

It looks and plays like an arcade platformer crossed with a maze chase, but there’s a lot of PUZZLE in Nuts & Milk too.

I suspect the reason this didn’t get a global release is because of the controls. Nuts & Milk has some brutally tough movement and jumping physics that, even though I finished the game, I never fully got the hang of. If you fall from too great a height, you’re temporarily stunned, which will probably lead to most of your deaths in the game. Nuts & Milk has fixed jumping, and one of the main “puzzle” elements is often just sussing out where you must take off from using a whole lot of trial and error. You can’t move through the bricks and there’s no jumping allowed on the ladders (the logs). The only thing you can do with ladders is fall off them at angles, which the game heavily incorporates into the level design.

Oh, it’s a question mark. I didn’t notice that until now.

But finding the correct jumping angles, let alone actually executing the jumps that get you home, can be quite difficult and a tad bit frustrating. If you had told me before today that a game that leaned so heavily into last-pixel jumps would score a YES! from me, I’d have thought you were nuts. “I am! Nuts AND Milk that is!” I’d say over a third of the levels will come down to taking off at the last possible split second when you jump, but sometimes, it feels unresponsive. You’ll likely need more than one attempt at least a few times for these situations, and shorting a jump means being stunned and vulnerable for a moment. This type of design is so common that it SHOULD be a deal breaker. In most games, it would be. Maybe it’s because this is a maze chase with some of the dumbest chasers in the genre’s history, but it didn’t bother me as much here. It adds tension for sure.

Here’s how you can tell it’s not an unreleased Nintendo coin-op: Nuts & Milk has a whopping 50 levels. FIFTY! Whoa! And most of them are pretty damn good too. There’s also a level editor too but I didn’t screw around with it. Sadly, the two player mode is hot seat style instead of co-op.

I’m with Mr. Kamiya. Yeah, where the f*ck is Nuts & Milk on the Switch Online library? It’s the rare genre buffet that actually isn’t half bad. What is it? A maze chase? A platformer? A puzzler? It’s all of that blended in equal parts, which is genuinely remarkable given the time period and the fact that this was Hudson’s first console project. It’s not an easy game. There’s a very sharp learning curve to the action even after you learn how easy it is to dupe the Nuts into falling off the ladders or into the water, which shouldn’t take players more than three or four levels to figure out. It never got a global release, though it was apparently well known to American audiences who bought bootleg multicarts, as it was a mainstay of those. Now that a major game designer has publicly called for its re-release, I think there’s a good chance Nintendo will work something out with Hudson. Nuts & Milk isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch, but it’s a damn solid waste of an hour that should have probably been an NES launch game.
Verdict: YES!

BONUS REVIEWS

Nuts & Milk is also a popular mainstay of the ROM hacking scene. Most are just graphical changes, but I found two that completely changed the levels and even made some gameplay adjustments.

Donkey Kong 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August 25, 2016
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Original Concept & Graphics by elbobelo
Designed by Googie
Link to patch at ROMHacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

I played through all fifty levels and then stupidly realized I was on the A mode instead of the B mode. The B mode adds the flies from Mario Bros. in place of the blimps and umbrellas for the helicopters.

Donkey Kong 2 is basically a fifty level expansion pack for Nuts & Milk. I imagine the next game will be as well. But hey, I liked Nuts & Milk and the game zips by really quickly so fifty new levels is a-okay with me. There’s some pretty ambitious level design in this one as well and a few new concepts, some that I liked and others I didn’t. In the bonus rounds, instead of simply trying to reach your girlfriend (who in Nuts & Milk is named Yogurt. I kept picturing Mel Brooks), you’re trying to grab an umbrella that continuously floats upward before it becomes out of reach. It’s not so fast that you should miss it, but it’s a nice touch that lends a sense of urgency.

And he didn’t half-ass the bonus rounds either. Even they have some decent level design.

A baffling change that I didn’t like was that, in the normal levels, when you grab the last item, the fireballs (replacing the nuts) die and start to float up to heaven. They’re not lethal at this point and you have a free pass to the end of the stage. I don’t know if this was done because the designer realized that a couple levels might be impossible to finish if they remain active. I started watching for that and I didn’t notice any stage that I thought I wouldn’t be able to avoid the fireballs if they remained active. It’s a strange choice that sucks the tension out of a key portion of the game that should, in theory, be the most tense: the final stretch before beating a stage.

You can see the deactivated fireballs here. For what it’s worth, the fireballs seem more threatening than the Nuts were in the original game, at least while they’re still alive.

The biggest change is in the level design mentality. Donkey Kong 2 is less puzzle-like and leans much heavier into the platforming part of the game. It utilizes the changing direction off the spring in mid-air technique to great effect and, at times, it makes for a more tense game than Nuts & Milk. But there’s also a sloppiness to Donkey Kong 2. The difficulty curve is all over the place. Some levels were very intense and took me a while to shake my chasers, but those levels might be followed by three or four cinches that took only seconds to beat and posed no challenge at all. Also, for some reason, the victory animation is the same sprite as Mario holding an umbrella. Only there is no umbrella, so instead it looks exactly like Mario is trying to give Pauline a Stone Cold Stunner and missing by a couple feet. Maybe he’s nearsighted?

In the B mode, umbrellas do appear in these stages. It wouldn’t have looked as janky as it does if he had just had Mario hold an umbrella.

While I had fun, I preferred Nuts & Milk’ near-perfect blending of three genres to Donkey Kong 2’s focus on platforming. It’s too bad that the “fireballs are defeated” concept wasn’t something used in the A mode that was dropped in the B mode. Nuts & Milk had uneven difficulty too, but it never felt like the game was outright surrendering to players. After a certain point, I wondered if the designer simply got bored with the project because, near the end of the game, there’s a stretch of multiple levels that felt phoned-in. Like this:

Honestly, I thought the first level was harder than a lot of the later stages. On the other hand, Googie did include a lot of stages that felt genuinely inspired. I wasn’t even sure I was going to bother finishing Donkey Kong 2 until I got to level seven. When I saw it, I sat up in my chair and said “yeah, I need to see this one all the way through to the end.” And I’m happy I did.

What’s even more interesting is that, had I never known about Nuts & Milk, I think I could have bought this as a legit unreleased sequel to Donkey Kong. Maybe. I mean if not for the graphical weirdness like the victory pose. I think making this a Donkey Kong Jr. game would have made a lot more sense. The heavy jumping physics and the spring physics feel more like that game than the original Donkey Kong. On a related note, one of the most famous “lost” games is one that never had so much as a single screenshot. In the mid-80s, Nintendo themselves promoted that they were working on a game called Donkey Kong Returns. Not only did nothing come of it, but nothing has been said about it in nearly forty years. I assume that Nintendo was going to re-sprite a Japanese game that never got a US release, perhaps even Konami’s King Kong (which I will be reviewing soon). If not for the fact that contemporary reports mentioned throwing barrels, I’d think a reworking of Nuts & Milk was the potential identity of Donkey Kong Returns. Had that happened, I think consumers would have believed it. That’s what Googie and elbobelo have proven. Good job, guys.
Verdict: YES!

How about one more?

Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released April 20, 2025
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Designed by Aether Knight
Link to patch at ROMhacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

I found out after I downloaded this that I’d already played one game by Aether Knight, his Solomon’s Key reworking that turned an already hard game into a game so cruel that the medical community labeled playing it an act of sadomasochism.

I actually played many more ROM hacks of Nuts & Milk than the two I did for this feature. There’s quite a few, but only Donkey Kong 2 and Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi were really worth mentioning. Of the two, Pochi & Bochi was hands down the best one. It’s really just another fifty-stage level pack with graphics inspired by Legacy of the Wizard (which I reviewed in Namco Museum Archives Volume 2: The Definitive Review), but the quality of level design is not only professional but incredibly clever. Whereas Donkey Kong 2 leaned into the platforming aspect of Nuts & Milk, Pochi opted to focus on the puzzle element. Designer Aether Knight especially utilized the screen-wrap to accomplish this. Most levels require a lot of carefully nabbing one fruit (now an item from Legacy of the Wizard) one at a time, then repeating a series of processes, all while trying to manipulate the Nuts (now clones of Pochi).

It could take a few minutes to complete a level. The amount of fine-tuning is remarkable.

The end result is a game that easily outshines the original. Had Nuts & Milk been a more popular game, I have no doubt this would be known as one of the best level pack styles of ROM hacks ever made. It’s so well done. Now, in fairness to Hudson Soft, Mr. Knight had a lifetime of games like this, plus based on his Solomon’s Key hack (that I’ll do one of these days but HOLY F*CK, it’s brutal), he seems to have a knack for complicated puzzle design. In fact, I think he takes things a little too far at times by over-utilizing last-pixel jumps. He’s certainly not guilty of anything Hudson didn’t do themselves, but since his levels are so much more optimized to make the chasers a threat, you likely won’t get a second chance if you short a jump here.

His stages were so punishing that I abandoned using the lives system and opted to use save states instead. Then again, one of the strangest aspects of Nuts & Milk is that the “code” to skip levels is simply hitting the select button, apparently. It feels like something accidentally left in the game after play testing was complete.

And, like both Hudson Soft and Googie before him, Aether Knight struggled with difficulty scaling. Like the level in the above picture, which took me multiple attempts to work out and then a couple minutes to finish in the run that succeeded. But then, I aced the next level with minimum brain power. Then the level after it was yet another “repeat the same process X amount of times” puzzle. In that level, pictured below, the three items above Pochi’s head (aka the pink one) can only be picked up one at a time, meaning you have to go through this entire gauntlet four full cycles to beat the level. Yes, four times. Don’t forget returning to the house, which is actually what beats the stage. And that’s assuming you don’t screw up a jump along the way.

No matter how tightly designed a level like this is, backtracking ALWAYS gets old after a while. I would have preferred if this style puzzle design was limited to two passes at most. Luckily for Pochi & Bochi, the maze chase element is there to save the day. Sometimes. Knight might have done TOO good a job engineering these levels in a way designed to prevent the chasers from auditioning for a role in Lemmings. You might have to do quite a lot of shimming to be able to give yourself enough space to operate with the damn enemies. But if you crave the close calls of a maze chase, there’s a LOT more of those moments in Pochi & Bochi than there is in Nuts & Milk.

The bonus levels are more spread out than in the main game, happening every fifth level. They also are designed to be more like mazes and have a unique gameplay mechanic: invisible (at first) springs. These are so tightly designed that I failed more than once (something I never did once in the previous builds of Nuts & Milk), and when I reached the finish line, it was often with only a split second to spare.

As repetitive and sometimes frustrating as it can be, I’m SO happy I ditched reviewing the MSX version of Nuts & Milk in favor of NES ROM hacks. I feel lucky that I got to experience Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi. It’s a MAJOR upgrade over Nuts & Milk and one of my favorite ROM hacks ever. It also speaks to the tragedy of Nuts & Milk not getting a global release. Who knows? Maybe the game would have been a major hit and sequels or spin-offs would have resembled this. There’s also a sadness to Knight’s effort. I love reviewing ROM hacks, but even with the really good ones, there’s always this heartbreaking voice in the back of my head saying “hardly anyone will ever play this, no matter how glowing your review.” If Konami ever does want to do something with Nuts & Milk, you don’t need to design another fifty levels in-house. The ones designed for this game are damn good puzzle/maze-chase levels that are every bit as professional as anything you could crank out.
Verdict: YES!

How good is Nuts & Milk? I just played 150 levels of it spread over three games and I was good to go for more.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Donkey Kong 2, Donkey Kong 2 NES, Donkey Kong 2 Review, Donkey Kong Returns, Drasle Family - Pochi & Bochi, Drasle Family - Pochi & Bochi Review, Nuts & Milk, Nuts & Milk Famicom, Nuts & Milk Famicom Review, Nuts & Milk NES, Nuts & Milk Nintendo, Nuts & Milk Review, Pochi Legacy of the Wizard

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Nintendo GameCube Review)

March 11, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released June 24, 2002
Directed by Denis Dyack
Developed by Silicon Knights
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

J. J. Abrams would cream himself with all the lens flares in this.

If you surveyed Nintendo fans about what GameCube titles they want to join the Switch Online service, I think there’s a good chance Eternal Darkness would win the vote. The top three would probably be it, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Hell, you can probably cross out the Zelda game. I’m guessing there’s a good portion of Twilight Princess fans who consider the Wii version to be the definitive version of it (I’m not among them but to each their own), so it’s Double Dash versus Eternal Darkness. Maybe my insanity meter is running on empty, but I think I’d put my money on Eternal Darkness. The most popular model of Switch 2 has Mario Kart World built into it, and most Switch 2 owners probably also have Mario Kart 8 in addition to an already nice selection of Mario Kart classics on Switch Online.

She kind of looks like a younger Jennifer Jason Leigh if she had been Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By the way, protagonist Alex is voiced by the great Jennifer Hale. The acting in Eternal Darkness, like most games of the period, is all over the place, but Hale’s performance stands out.

Meanwhile, it’s a safe bet that a lot of people who were interested in Eternal Darkness never actually played it. It might have been a critical darling, but it was a bust in sales and not the system mover Nintendo was hoping for. I think a big part of that was skepticism by consumers after the game jumped from a late Nintendo 64 release to an early GameCube one. Or maybe it just felt like Nintendo was trying too hard to court older audiences. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t find any global sales figures for it besides “it sold less than X units.” But, to give you some perspective, in Japan Eternal Darkness sold so poorly it didn’t even chart (Wikipedia calls it 18,000 units but I couldn’t verify that). That can’t be chalked-up to lack of interest in the genre or being on the “wrong platform” either. Resident Evil Zero, released almost exactly a month later, sold 400,000 units in Japan alone. OUCH. Canada reports similar numbers, and for a game designed in Canada no less.

Graphically, playing Eternal Darkness in 2026 makes for an interesting project. On one hand, with the character models and the way they move, you can totally tell this was meant to be a Nintendo 64 game that was haphazardly moved to GameCube. On the other hand, the settings are often awe-inspiring and the game does successfully build atmosphere. While I don’t think it comes that close to Silent Hill 2’s “this place is so evil that even the air itself feels sinister” vibe, I think a little bit of bonus credit has to be given for the circumstances with the platform switch.

Based on those figures and similar sales of other key games, my “pulled out of my ass, this is not an actual sales figure” guesstimate is that Eternal Darkness probably sold around 150,000 units globally, and that’s my most generous ballpark. That means there’s a LOT of people who missed out and have had to listen to two decades of glowing accolades and high placements on such lists as “best GameCube games of all-time” and “best horror games of all-time” and even “best video games of all-time.” So in my hypothetical fan vote, if Eternal Darkness didn’t get a plurality of the votes, it’d finish top-three for sure. That’s why I wanted to do this review. I figured there was no way it could possibly hold-up to THAT type of reputation. I wanted to know if Eternal Darkness is one of those games that had a finite window of relevance, and if that window has since slammed shut. And now that my introduction is out of the way, I have to give you the following warning:

⚠️THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS⚠️

The final paragraph with the verdict is spoiler free.

My casual-at-best gaming family honestly thought I was playing a Resident Evil game. The main mansion the game takes place in does have a similar vibe.

Eternal Darkness’ is the story of the Nintendo funding middle school quality Lovecraft fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. The game centers around the ~~Necronomicon~~ Tome of Eternal Darkness, a book bound in human skin that chronicles the struggle of humanity against The ~~Great Old Ones~~ Ancients, a race of cosmic deities that want to, like, be evil and eat humanity and stuff. Full disclosure: I don’t know sh*t about the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ve never read it. It doesn’t interest me. So I’m not really concerned that Eternal Darkness’ story cribs so heavily off Lovecraft and was fine letting the narrative stand on its own. Okay, I think it’s really f*cking weird that the game actually acknowledges the existence of Lovecraft’s lore within its world. It reminded me of Alan Wake’s constant references to Stephen King. Like, you can’t just do that sh*t and expect even a non-fan like myself to not find it cringey.

Apparently a common trope in Lovecraft fan fiction is that all the lore was actually real and Lovecraft was writing about stuff he actually knew to be true. Eternal Darkness never outright comes out and says that, but I mean, come on, how else can you read into this reference in the game? Was H.P. Lovecraft the Doug Forcett of this universe? Does Pious have his picture hanging in his evil office with “CLOSEST GUESS” engraved in the frame?

So, the cosmic horror plot didn’t really do much for me. But, as was the case with basically every aspect of Eternal Darkness, every negative is also made positive and every positive is made negative. The lame story creates a compelling framing device for a sprawling epic that takes place in such far-distance time periods as 2000 AD. They didn’t even have iPhones back then! F*cking barbaric! The game is divided into twelve chapters that each takes place in a different time and stars a different character. This was probably Silicon Knight’s most unambiguously successful concept for the game, because each of the twelve different player characters feels completely different. They move at different speeds, have different weapons, and their life/health/sanity meters are all different sizes. Eternal Darkness screws up many good ideas, but they didn’t f*ck up actual gameplay spread over thousands of years through the eyes of twelve different characters INCLUDING the main villain. That would be a genuinely remarkable achievement for any era. No notes there.

Some of the characters have the Book of Evil Evilness nearby them. Others will be magically transported during a predetermined point early in their chapter to this alternate dimension to claim the book. Those faces on the floor scream, and the whole effect (especially the sound design) is so terrifying that the game was too intense for the younger kids to watch. Eternal Darkness is a genuinely scary game when it wants to be. Too bad most of the “sanity effects” went the other direction.

Each chapter is introduced by main character Alexandra “Alex” Roivas. Playing as her, you search the mansion using clues or abilities learned from the previous chapter to locate a page torn from the Notcronomicon. Sometimes the page is literally right there next to her (especially early in the game), and sometimes she has to do rudimentary “use object A on object B” puzzles. And clearly the developers had very little faith in people exploring because sometimes you’ll immediately get a letter that says something to the effect of “I left something for you in this room.” It’s like a horror game directed by a helicopter parent.

When an enemy is defeated, you’re given a chance to “FINISH IT!” (yes, it literally says FINISH IT) which will regain around 90% of the sanity you presumably got sucked from you. Sometimes, seemingly at random, the game will do a close-up of the finishing blow, even if there’s more enemies gathered around.

Selecting the pages in the menu starts the next chapter, and in all but the first chapter, you play as a character who comes into possession of the Notcronomicon. That first chapter sees you take the role of eventual antagonist Pious Augustus. Pious? Seriously? Okay. The first major problem with Eternal Darkness reveals itself here as this glorified tutorial level (1) lacks the trademark insanity effects and (2) presents players with three different relics that change the cosmic horror Baron Von Evil will pray to. One is green, one is red, and one is blue. Each of the three colors represents a different difficulty setting, but the problem is that those consequences aren’t told to players, nor is the game’s color-coated rock-papers-scissors mechanic explained before this. Well, unless you notice a context-free picture in the hallway of the house that shows it.

In my second playthrough that I swore up and down I wouldn’t do, I ended up choosing blue. Allegedly, green was supposed to be Eternal Darkness’ “easy mode” but I thought the blue difficulty was a lot easier. Since your magic refills just by walking around, logically THAT should be considered the easy mode.Then again, the room layouts don’t really change and I knew exactly what I was doing each level during my blue play playthrough. (shrug) Allegedly red is the hard mode but I didn’t play that. I did ultimately like Eternal Darkness more than I disliked it, but it’s not exactly a game most people would want to play three times in a row.

In Eternal Darkness, red beats green and also pisses off bulls. Green beats blue and also indicates a healthy diet high in fiber. Finally, blue beats red, which is really sad when you think about it. If the two colors could settle their differences and get along, together they could make movies appear to pop out of the screen. Eternal Darkness leans very heavily into the color rivalry. Pick the green item? You’ll be mostly fighting green monsters and casting red spells to solve puzzles or buff your weapons. It’s more than just the facade of a difference, too. The color you choose also decides what cutscenes you see, which versions of basic enemies you fight, an entire boss battle, and the order of which you gain the tools needed to cast specific colors of spells. Also, each color specifically ties to a different meter, which is how the difficulty is adjusted. Red is the hard mode because enemies directly target your health meter, while blue enemies target the magic meter and green the sanity meter. Also, major enemies change quite a bit. Like, the “horrors” in the green mode look like this:

While in blue mode, they look like this:

“You said we’re shamelessly ripping off H.R. Giger!” “No you idiot! We’re ripping off H.P. Lovecraft! P is a totally different letter from R!” “It’s only one slash mark different. Not even a full slash mark. A half slash mark.” “THEIR LAST NAMES ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT! LOVECRAFT IS SPELLED NOTHING LIKE GIGER!” “I thought you were telling me you LOVED my CRAFT!” “I’m surrounded by morons. Well, thank god Epic Games is coming to the rescue with a foolproof game engine!” (flash) “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING!“

By the way, the red one looks just like a three-headed Predator.

If this whole thing comes across like needless padding designed to turn fifteen hours worth of gameplay into a forty hour game, well, that’s exactly what it feels like. I wish I could have opted-in to JUST fighting the different bosses or maybe even unlocking the ability to replay each chapter with a different color after the credits rolled instead of having to play through the whole game two more times. There were some interesting differences. I was surprised by how different Skeletor behaved in each of the two quests I played. In the green quest, the evil dark god Xel’lotath (also voiced partially by Jennifer Hale) is a bit a of a smart ass and playfully knows Pious is planning to betray it (nothing comes of that) but kind of rolls with it and the two have a tit-for-tat partnership and come up with their evil plan together. In the blue quest, a galactic space jellyfish named Ulyaoth is the dark god and Emperor Skullface the Wicked is a total submissive bitch to it while Jelly the Doombringer does all the planning.

The character of Karim was a literal last-second addition. Originally his chapter was going to star a Templar Knight but this was changed following the attacks of September 11. Karim’s level ends with him acquiring what is probably the most fun to use weapon in the game: this gigantic f*ck you sword that made me feel like Ned Stark.

So at least there is SOME effort to make the three different modes feel different, but it’s just not enough to justify the things that had to be done to make it work. I would have much preferred a more optimized single quest that had a much bigger variety of enemies because there’s not enough creatures OR locations in Eternal Darkness. Despite having twelve distinct characters, the action only happens in four specific settings: the starting mansion in modern (well, 2000) Rhode Island, a temple that’s supposed to be part of the Angkor Thom area in Cambodia, a gigantic cathedral in France, and a temple in ancient Persia. I’ll be generous and count the gigantic underground area connected to the mansion as a fifth setting, but that’s still not enough to keep the sight-seeing fresh, and this in a game with a story that does things that I found to be frustrating as a viewer. Like, some chapters start with the heroes being chummy with guys who look like f*cking zombies and are clearly evil, but they don’t acknowledge it at all. They’re so polite about it that they don’t even look at these obviously demonic humanoids like they have a booger hanging out of their nose. It happens a lot, too. Chapter Three does it:

“I want you to deliver this scroll that most certainly isn’t booby trapped to Emperor Charlemagne. He’s DYING to read it! MUAHAHAHA! Oh, pardon my evil laugh and don’t worry. I swear to the dark gods I sacrifice virgins to that the scroll isn’t enchanted with a spell that will quickly turn him into a living corpse. Trust me, a purple-skinned, dead-eyed monster wearing a black cloak. Does this look like a face that would lie to you?”

Chapter Six does it.

“When I killed your brother, I talked just…… like…… THIS!”

Chapter seven REALLY does it.

“I can’t believe you would give the Inquisition a bad name!”

And there’s really no other way to look at it: either the heroic characters are polite and naive to a fault or they’re complete dumb f*cks. It’s another one of those things that gave me a “they didn’t have faith in the players” vibe. Visually, it’s telegraphing like you would expect from a Saturday morning cartoon, not a psychological horror game made for adults. Did the villains HAVE to look like demons right from the start in every chapter? Wouldn’t it have been so much scarier if they looked like normal people, at least at first? Then again, the bad guy in the last two pictures is Pious Augustus in disguise, using the names “Paul Augustine” and “Phillipe Augustine.” It’s just too stupid to take seriously and it’s not scary or even suspenseful storytelling. Scary and suspenseful would have been populating the game with more NPC characters and leaving an air of mystery as to who Pious was posing as in each chapter. You can’t do a big, sprawling multi-generational saga if you don’t have the patience to tell the story properly.

Yep, Chapter Eight does it too, but here Pious is disguised as Timur, aka Tamerlane, the Turco-Mongol conqueror who is revealed to be Pious immediately. Yikes.

So I thought Eternal Darkness’ story was f*cking lame. The idea is solid, really. The execution wasn’t good. It’s kind of telling that they could cut a playable character named Joseph De Molay at the eleventh hour, reduce his entire contribution to the narrative to a context-free cutscene between chapters, and then slot in a new character with no connection to the plot at all, literally never interacting with Pious or the evil gods, and nothing feels lost. Such a thing should have been heavily damaging to the flow of the story, but because all the portrayals of evil are so comically over the top, the heroes so completely clueless, and the writing so on-the-nose that you’d swear it’s being made for young children, it doesn’t make a lick of difference. But, as bad as the writing and character models are, the settings, enemy design, and architecture are genuinely spooky. Some of those enemies are absolute nightmare fuel.

Real shame about the plot, because the character designs are some truly spooky sh*t. Look at this f*cking thing! I want my mommy! You know, so it can eat her instead of me!

And the story isn’t even the worst problem. Having four levels is bad enough, but their layouts are especially awful. There’s too much backtracking, and sometimes there’s so much of it that I actually got angry about it. In the seventh chapter you take the role of a friar and a potential ally needs to see proof that the guys who have taken over the church are evil. I mean, they literally look like undead demons and are talking about absolute power and have unholy literature laying around the entire f*cking church, but this guy really believes in due process I guess. Just talking to him requires a lot of busy work and backtracking, but to get the evidence, you have to re-backtrack through areas you’ve already been into far away from where this guy is located to grab a single item that you then must return to him in the same room you last met him in located on the literal opposite side of the map. It’s not like enemies always respawn, so it’s mostly backtracking through empty rooms. It leads to a lot of dead air that’s made more tedious because you’ve seen a large chunk of this location once already in a previous chapter, and indeed, you’ll see the same location again later on. It’s horrible design, completely unoptimized for both horror and action.

By the way, the “proof” is basically a signed note by Pious affirming his commitment to all things evil and unholy. See, this is what I mean. The heroes are already dumb enough, but this guy? If his lying eyes weren’t proof enough, why would he trust this note? How would he know that Paul Luther (yep, that’s the friar’s name. Good f*cking God) didn’t just forge it? So let me get this straight: the other monks have blue f*cking skin and talk about their desire to rule the world with an iron fist. Other dialog in the level specifically says they don’t do church services, prayer, rituals, or anything else you would expect a Christian religious order to do. None of that is proof enough for this chucklef*ck, but a note handed to him by a guy who just arrived at the church that day is? I literally can’t believe anyone thinks the writing in Eternal Darkness is historically amazing. Hell, it’s not even decent. It’s bad, folks. No, not just bad. Eternal Darkness is a TERRIBLY written video game. But I’ll chalk that up to being a product of its time. The same game in 2026 would certainly be much smarter.

It didn’t have to be this way, either. Have the ally show up when you get the item. Have there be a passage that leads directly to the end of the level. What were they thinking with this? The only way I could spin it in a way that makes logical sense is that they wanted to leave open the potential to be hit with more sanity effects (assuming they played like I did and deliberately kept their sanity low), but by the seventh chapter you’ve probably seen most of them already anyway. Maybe if they had more settings they wouldn’t have needed to pad the game out to the degree they do here.

When a trapper gets you, you’re teleported every single time to this room, which is actually a good thing if you’re low on health or sanity because you get a free refill if you can time when to enter the right color of teleporter. This is one of many reasons why Eternal Darkness isn’t exactly the hardest game. If you play really conservatively, the only way I could see a player dying is if the instakill bonethieves possess you. In the event you do die, you have to go through all the opening credits in the main menu to restart from where you last saved. No auto-saving, nor can you save in any room that has monsters present. Again, a product of its time that would be different (and better) if the same game were made today.

The final third of the game is somehow even worse about it. At the end of Chapter Ten, you have to activate a device that looks an awful lot like the titular device from Stargate and then teleport to eight different locations to input a rune stone. Then, after each one, you don’t just teleport back to the Stargate chamber. You have to make your way through a room either fighting monsters or solving puzzles, then return to the room before the Stargate chamber, which is like the hub. Then, in the final chapter, you have to do the same thing again, only with different puzzles AND additional busy work, because this time, the floor in the main hub is covered with this:

The floor zaps you, requiring you to cast a fully-charged magic shield nearly every time you return to the hub. It’s the same thing you’ve already done eight times over, repeated an additional eight times, only with added steps that are little more than busy work. So not only is Eternal Darkness padded to all hell, but it’s overindulgent in how it goes about doing it. None of this is in service to a player’s ability to enjoy the game. The first time you do this sequence, there’s a mini-boss that has to be killed, but once it’s dead, it doesn’t come back. The mini-boss isn’t there the second time, and instead you have this electric piss stain you have to cast spells against. That’s boring. All this backtracking and all the repetitive crap that doesn’t involve slicing up enemies is boring. If you could cut all this gristle out of the game, it’d probably only be six to eight hours long, but that six to eight hours would have been edge-of-your-seat the entire time. Hell, maybe if they dropped the three-routes concept, they could have added a couple extra levels and squeezed ten AMAZING hours out of the narrative in a natural, satisfying way. Alas.

Needs more James Spader and Kurt Russell.

Re-reading everything above, it probably comes across like I completely hated Eternal Darkness, but I didn’t. The action is pretty fun. Clunky, but fun. Combat is based around locking-on to enemies and performing unlicensed amputations on them. Early on, you mostly just chop off their heads and both arms. Decapitation and dismemberment is always fun by itself, but the enemy behavior really puts it over the top. If a room has multiple zombies, it’s absolutely a valid strategy to lop off all their heads before you finish them off. Headless zombies stop chasing you and flail aimlessly when you’re close by. The non-humanoid enemies lack that charm. For them, targeting specific parts lacks the visceral thrill of tearing them limb from limb, but it’s still satisfying enough when they die, I guess. Oh, and Eternal Darkness is the rare game with both guns and edge weapons where the stabby things are more fun to use than the things that go boom.

One character gets a goddamned elephant gun that practically sends him through walls when he shoots it, while the second-to-last chapter loads you up with automatic rifles and grenades. That sounds great, but that level is full of big bads including these things, called “Gatekeepers.” They’re not so fun to shoot because they don’t really register damage until they die. The actual models look great. Like a cross between the grim reaper and a bug, but they’re not fun to actually battle. I think this might be a relic of the N64 build, as surely the GameCube could have handled their heads or wings flying off.

I’ve waited long enough to talk about the sanity effects. It’s the thing everyone talks about with Eternal Darkness, and they usually also note how Nintendo literally has a patent on the concept of a sanity meter. As I said above, I kept my sanity deliberately low in order to experience as many things as I could. Some of the effects work, especially when they’re tied directly to the live gameplay. Hearing footsteps, a banging door, or having the camera tilt into a dutch angle? That’s the stuff that worked for me. Pictures change from serene landscapes to hellish ones. The music changes and you hear unsettling sound effects. I can’t stress enough that the sound design of Eternal Darkness remains God Tier to this day. Worry not, dear readers. Unlike most games, I played this one with the volume turned the f*ck up, which hopefully makes up for my inability to play games in the dark.

Nothing says “you’ve lost your mind” quite like a dutch angle.

But ultimately, I found most of the effects to be more like a series of juvenile pranks that run out of steam well before the game is over. Like, I must have walked into a room turned upside-down at least a dozen times over my first playthrough, which is ALSO happening in addition to the camera tipping over in the above picture. Neat gag the first time. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, but then it kept repeating over the rest of the game and it just became a massive waste of time every time it was rerun. It got to the point where I immediately turned around and tried to open the door to end the hallucination. Same with walking into a room and being swarmed by enemies and the attack button doesn’t work, which happened, again, probably at least a dozen times. Taking a few steps only to have my head explode? Probably a half-dozen times, then add three times where the head fell off and recited poetry. Other times, whatever happened was so subtle that I never even figured out what happened. I’d walk into a room and would be making my way to the next door when the flash would happen and I’d be back at the previous door. The one off gags were much better, but they were VASTLY outnumbered by the sh*t that kept repeating.

This hallucination of Alex getting a visit from her creepy uncle happened multiple times. I thought this was one of the “predetermined location” effects like the famous “to be continued in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Redemption” gag, but no, because the dialog was identical to the previous one. In fact, I think I got an identical one three or four times.

In total, two effects REALLY “got me” and one was entirely situational because I had botched using the save/load menu a couple times, saving when I meant to load. So when the game asked me if I wanted to delete all my files, I was like “oh crap!” for about one second, until I realized it was probably a sanity effect. Had I not screwed up before, I don’t think I would have bought it. The other one that got me was walking into a room that was littered with shotgun shells. I was delighted because I knew the level had a boss fight and I figured it meant it was about to happen. But nope. After I picked up six or seven of them, the flash happened, the guy screamed out “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING” and I found out how aerodynamic my controller was (not very). That was a mean one, but then later in the game, it repeated and I didn’t buy it because I’D ALREADY F*CKING SEEN IT!

This is yet another one that repeated way too many times. Your head falls off, and then you pick it up and it’s reading Shakespeare. Got this one three times.

It’s ironic that Nintendo got that patent on the meter, because the meter IS the problem, along with not having enough gags. If they wanted to prank the players with tricks like resetting back to the opening screen or faking out like you’d finished the game and the story would be continued in the sequel, fine. I admit, I laughed a few times. Like when this happened:

*I* knew it was coming. It was one of the few sanity effects I remembered from my original 2002 playthrough that I now realize I never finished (I didn’t quit because I was only 13 and terrified of the game. WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?!). But my father didn’t know it was coming, and since I was using an emulator, he bought it. And we laughed at things like having the controller disconnect or the TV shut off. I don’t know how SCARY most of these pranks are. I mean, maybe if Ashton Kutcher had showed up afterwards to tell me I’d been Punk’d, and that’s only scary because it’s still the year 2002 and Danny Masterson can’t be far behind.

This was the scariest thing in the game. For a second, I thought I was going to have to playthrough one of the Nintendo 64 Castlevania games.

But it would have worked so much better if the designers had just designated areas to have context-sensitive gags and ditched the meter altogether. Then they could have tailored specific hallucinations to specific situations and incorporated it better into the gameplay. Later games that have sanity effects figured this out and feel much more psychological and less like you’re on the gaming version of the Candid Camera. Because they didn’t create enough gags to last the entire runtime, Eternal Darkness’ pranks stop being funny and start being annoying. Very, very annoying. For that reason, the effects feel more gimmicky than inspired to me. Like almost everything else about Eternal Darkness, it’s a good idea that’s run into the ground.

The final battle against Pious has one of the worst layouts for a boss battle I’ve seen, and even worse, there’s no sanity effects! The whole game is based around the idea of losing your mind and they couldn’t come up with a single gag to f*ck with players one last time? That sort of confirms to me the whole sanity thing, whether it’s true or not, is a gimmicky band-aid. They SO wanted this to do for the horror genre what Mortal Kombat’s fatalities did for fighting games, but they just aren’t good enough.

For all my bitching, I found playing Eternal Darkness in 2026 to be compelling enough to see it through to the end, then go back on my vow to not play through it a second time. In fairness, I needed that second playthrough to get a feel for the differences between each of the three opening choices. If not for the fact that I was writing this review, I would never have played it a second time, let alone twice in a row. I certainly can’t say the second time was better. I was SO BORED during that second playthrough. There’s a LOT of unavoidable downtime in Eternal Darkness, and replaying the game immediately and knowing all the stretches of backtracking I had to look forward to made shudder. I found myself leaving enemies alive just so I’d have something to do on the return trip. That’s NEVER a good sign. And yet, I was constantly reminded by several highlights in each chapter why this made so many best-of lists. There’s a terrific game buried somewhere in this corpse of a once-great game.

Sorry, kids: no sequel for you.

Is Eternal Darkness a masterpiece? Maybe once upon a time. It’s one of those games where I can see how players at the end of its console cycle could cite it as one of the greatest games ever, but time has not been kind to it. Every aspect of it, from the combat to the sanity effects and even the Cthulhu Mythos homage, have since been done better. Especially in areas like writing, where I think modern gamers would actually be embarrassed for Eternal Darkness because it’s SO badly written and produced from a cinematic point of view. There’s nothing original left that belongs only to it or where it’s still among the best representations of its genre, and that means the horrible level layouts, on-the-nose writing, and repetitive sanity effects stand out much more today, in 2026, than they did back in its day. The only element that can stand side-by-side with all the similar games that have hit in the two decades since its release is the sound design, and if that hasn’t aged one bit by this point, it never will. Oh, and the variety of characters, but that takes a major hit from how bad the actual levels they occupy are.

Well, he wanted proof they were evil! F*ck, who am I kidding? Right after the knife was brought down and the life was draining from his body, he was still probably like “I need to give these demon-looking mother f*ckers the benefit of the doubt.”

While I think a Switch Online release will happen, I hope for the sake of Eternal Darkness it’s sooner rather than later. The more time that passes, the worse this game will get. The gameplay, level design, and script are only going to continue to decay. In the state they’re in, I think people under thirty who weren’t raised on GameCube won’t get the appeal in Eternal Darkness at all. Hell, I think that’s true of people who wanted to play it in 2002 but never got around to it. The window for Eternal Darkness winning new “best of” fandom I think is closed and now the game sits firmly in the “you really had to be there” category, at least if you expect an all-time classic. Eternal Darkness is a tragic reminder that games aren’t made to be timeless. If that happens, it’s a bonus, but they’re designed to appeal to players by the standards of when they’re released. As a 2002 game, Eternal Darkness is a tantalizing glimpse into the potential of games. As a 2026 game? Eternal Darkness was NEVER going to completely stand-up to the test of time. It’s not reasonable to expect it to do so.

I didn’t beat the game three times and instead opted to look up the true ending on YouTube. For all your efforts, you’ll be treated to a tacked-on epilogue that tells you this blob of goo, Mantorok the Corpse God, was behind everything. It’s been trapped in Cambodia and is “dying” but was actually manipulating all the events and getting Alex and her ancestors the books, and that all the playthroughs were alternate realities. Now that each god has murdered its rival in all possible timelines, the blob is plotting for a sequel that will never happen. Whatever. The plot was terrible, the dialog added wrinkles to my face from all the cringing and I couldn’t have cared less what this thing was. Apparently the purple magic (that I didn’t even find in my first playthrough) is tied to it and was more powerful than the green/blue/red magic. Then why is this thing the one elder god that was already neutralized when the story starts? Again, f*cking dumb.

BUT, I also think there’s just enough meat left on the bones for Eternal Darkness to still stand on its raw gameplay merits. The combat, dodgy as it might be, can also be very satisfying. In the rare instances where the level design shines, there’s an Indiana Jones-like vibe to the action. Of course, since there was no IP they didn’t, ahem, liberally borrow from, at one point an Indiana Jones stand-in shows up that lends itself to the whole 9-year-old’s Cthulhu fan fiction feel of the whole thing. “And then the Alien shows up only it has three heads! And then Indiana Jones shows up and he gets the Necronomicon from Army of Darkness! And then there’s a Stargate!” It’s, at most times, silly. That sucks because when it goes for scary, it usually succeeds. I wish it went for scary a lot more.

In the Indiana Jones level (and it basically is just Indiana Jones) you have to go to the menu and use a brush to inspect where spider webs are. The whole item system feels like a point & click game that wished upon a star and turned into an action game.

As eye-rolling as it can be, I’ll be damned if the set dressings and sanity effects aren’t worth seeing once. I mean, you’ll see them a lot more than once, but you know what I mean. And the sound design really should be studied in game design school. It’s so well done. There’s also a sincerity to Eternal Darkness. For all of its lifting of the ideas of better writers and storytellers, it never feels cynical. So no, Eternal Darkness didn’t deserve to bomb. It didn’t deserve to age as badly as it did either, but that’s just how it works. Who knows? Had this same game been on PlayStation 2, maybe Silicon Knights survives to this day and Eternal Darkness becomes a major franchise. I’m sure there has to be at least one timeline where it happened.

For what it’s worth, I enjoyed Eternal Darkness’ fixed cameras a lot more than Resident Evil’s from this era.

My unofficial theme of 2026 seems to be “set your expectations accordingly.” I don’t think Eternal Darkness holds up enough that it should still be appearing on best-of lists. I think anyone who sees it on such a list who never played it during the GameCube’s lifespan and tries it today won’t see what all the fuss is about. Well, I’m guessing that’s because most of those list makers are basing their ranking of Eternal Darkness on how the game made them feel in 2002, but it ain’t 2002 anymore. Eternal Darkness is aging so badly that it’s barely holding onto relevance. If you still expect an all-time classic, you’re going to need a time machine and temporal amnesia to forget about all the games you’ve played over the last twenty-four years. It’s probably going to let you down.

(raises glass) Cheers to your father, Mr. Dyack.

But, if you temper your expectations and instead go into Eternal Darkness expecting a relic of its time that has elements that can still be fun today, it isn’t a waste of time. I also think there’s valuable lessons, good and bad, for game designers. The only thing I care about is that I had more fun than not, and I think I had just about the bare minimum that Eternal Darkness needed to still be worth a look in 2026. This was as close as any game I’ve ever rated and I went through several stretches believing Eternal Darkness was heading for a NO! The all-time great never emerged, but I did enjoy a solid early 2000’s style action-adventure game in a horror setting that desperately needed streamlining for its level design. Set your expectations accordingly. I think Switch Online subscribers will probably get that chance in the not too distant future. But I’d much rather prefer a remake or an extensive remastering to a re-release. Pushing this out as it is in 2026? I think most people will react the way I did: just barely satisfied and also hugely let down. With as far as gaming as come, I’d rather see Eternal Darkness rise from the dead with a brand new remake, and maybe this time, it’ll find its audience.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Eternal Darkness, Eternal Darkness GameCube Review, Eternal Darkness Review, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem GameCube, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem Nintendo, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem Review, GameCube reviews

Super Princess Peach (Nintendo DS Review)

March 6, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Super Princess Peach
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released October 20, 2005 (JPN) February 27, 2006 (US)
Concept by Takayuki Ikeda
Directed by Akio Imai and Azusa Tajima
Developed by Tose
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Mario Wiki

For the purposes of this review, let’s just take it for granted that there are two screens and, unless I’m talking about one of the touchscreen mini-games, not every screenshot needs both screens visible. The hearts are as follows: JOY (yellow) RAGE (red) GLOOM (blue) and calm (green). Not pictured; unimpressed.

I just did Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a game famous for its difficulty. Super Princess Peach is on the opposite end of the difficulty spectrum. It’s probably most famous for being perhaps the most breezy Nintendo platformer ever. I think the original Kirby’s Dream Land is far easier, but Super Princess Peach certainly has a case. Oddly enough, the game it WANTS to share the most in common with is Yoshi’s Island. From the graphics style to the end goals to the pacing, this is Yoshi’s Island. Just drop the satisfying egg shooting mechanics and replace them with an umbrella that’s functionally a sword and you have the basic gist of Super Princess Peach. Only it doesn’t come even a little bit close to that masterpiece in level design or enjoyment, but it tried so gosh darn hard that I kind of feel bad for it.

It’s not JUST the end goals that feel like they’re trying to invoke Yoshi’s Island, though they certainly don’t help.

The umbrella-based combat just lacks the satisfaction that you’d normally want from a Mario game. “But it’s NOT a Mario game! It’s a Peach game!” Is it though? Because the level design, enemies, layouts, and game flow are definitively Mario/Yoshi like. Peach’s attack and controls make her like a bonus character unlocked at the end of the Mario game instead of the star of her own game, and that’s even if you factor in the “vibes.” Peach has three extreme emotions that are used for solving the most basic of puzzles, plus a fourth that restores your health. One of them makes her overjoyed, which for some reason causes her to turn into a tornado. One of them makes her cry, which causes her to run really fast, and one turns her into a Karen who wants to speak to the manager right f*cking now, and also she’s on fire and heavier? Neither of those have ever happened to me when I’m pissy. Well, I did catch fire once but I was really mad, and I don’t think she is.

“I ordered the cheddar broccoli, not the clam chowder!”

I think you could probably make a solid action game with this premise, but Super Princess Peach’s problem is that it just has no faith in players. Even deep into the game, if there’s an element that requires one of the vibes to get past, there will almost certainly be an info block that spells out to you how exactly to get past it. Even when those elements repeat, with the same sprites and similar type of layout leading up to it, the game designers apparently didn’t want anyone to have to use even the most minuscule amount of brain power.

I’m almost never on the side of the blowhards who complain about games being too hand-holdy. With Super Princess Peach, I’m siding with the blowhards. This game holds your hand so tightly that it causes necrosis.

Okay, fine, just don’t hit the info blocks, right? Sure, but the game also repeats the “puzzles” with the same sprites anyway. The only way Super Princess Peach wouldn’t grow stale is if it changed-up the look of the things that you use the vibes on. The amount of gates or obstacles that require the vibes are too limited. You also get a limited amount of vibe energy, at least at the start of the game that you can purchase upgrades for. Eventually you can unlock a thing that allows you to recharge the meter by standing still. Even that is botched, as you have to wait FOREVER for it to activate and start recharging. Before getting that, you have to conserve your vibe power, and that means you’re kind of discouraged from using it on enemies. So I found the whole vibe thing to be a waste of time outside the bosses, all of whom require the vibes to defeat.

With the giant wiggler here, you have to weigh-down plungers using the anger vibe, and after a hugely annoying delay, it’ll flip it over and allow you to damage it. This could have been a sweet boss battle if not for the timing issues.

So the main focus of the game is typical Mario platforming with a sword, more or less. If you jump on an enemy, it just tips it over and allows you to either finish it off with a whack of the umbrella or you can pick it up and throw it. You can unlock extra umbrella tactics like a charge attack or the ability to briefly slow your fall. During the main quest, there’s forty stages and eight boss fights. Each level has three toads and usually a puzzle piece or music track hidden somewhere in it. And by “hidden” I mean a ton of them are just laid along the main path you take. Instead of one hit deaths, you start with three hearts, with all forms of damage only taking half a heart, and again, you can upgrade this. Thanks to the “relax” vibe, I find it unlikely the average experienced gamer will die. Even if you fall into a pit, you’re reset with only a half-heart ding to your health, and you don’t even need the vibe to restore your life. Refills are plentiful, as are enemy combos that drop both health and emotional refills.

This “swinging by a rope” gimmick would make for a good one-time set piece. Twice at most. But it’s repeated constantly and never offers any meaty challenge because every section feels kind of samey with only the slightest uptick in “difficulty” via more complicated tracks.

Once upon a time, a minority of players got offended because in a game starring a girl, Peach uses her emotional state to “get her way” because women are too emotional. I think it’s more silly than offensive, and if anything about the game actually is sexist, I’d think it’s how damn easy Super Princess Peach is. The game offers NOTHING in the way of resistance or challenge. If Tose’s intent was that it was the first Mario platformer marketed specifically for girls and so they better tone back the difficulty to suit their delicate feminine needs, that would be gross, but I couldn’t find any interview or really much in the way of any behind the scenes talk on Super Princess Peach. I’m NOT going to assume bad intent on a developer’s part, especially with a game that was obviously made with the best of intentions. And yeah, they sent the game to critics in boxes scented with perfume. What can I say? It was a different time.

At its strongest, the levels in Super Princess Peach feel like early levels in either Mario World or Yoshi’s Island.

I also don’t buy that they would have felt pressure to market towards girls because it’s a female character. Nintendo fans had already been inoculated from cooties since the NES era. Never mind that Metroid is a beloved franchise starring probably the most famous female game protagonist, because Peach herself had already stolen the show in the very first sequel (well, in the US) to Nintendo’s flagship series. I’ve heard from enough Mario 2 fans to know that Peach was THE most popular character for players from all walks of life in Super Mario Bros. 2. So the whole “they made a baby’s game because it starred a girl” thing doesn’t pass the smell test to me. I just think the entire project was flawed from the drawing board. Really, Nintendo and Tose’s biggest mistake was trying to shoehorn Peach into a Mario-style game instead of building off of the popularity of Peach in Mario 2. She was the cool one who could hover for a couple seconds when she jumped. Build a game tailored to the hover! THIS should have been the Mario 2 sequel I’ve been dying for since I played Super Mario Advance.

Before every boss, there’s a touch screen mini-game that there’s really no fail condition for. If you take damage, you just start over with a slightly easier layout until you reach the goal. There’s also some microphone-based mini-games that have to be bought from the store and various other gimmicky things like jigsaw puzzles. I found all the touchscreen usage to be arbitrary and half-assed. If Nintendo were to re-release this on Switch, it wouldn’t take much adjustment. I wouldn’t bother, though.

But, instead Peach stars in a game that feels like it belongs to another character. The majority of enemies and bosses are copy and paste jobs from Mario games. Yoshi Island stood out because it had a healthy mix of Mario staples along with new, original enemies. The only aspect of Peach’s rogues gallery that is unique to her is that the enemies are emotional too. I didn’t even realize this until late in the game, because whether an enemy is crying or angry, a whack of the umbrella is all it takes to stop them. Things like that make me wonder if they had a more meaty, ambitious game and then just lost their nerve halfway through development. Like, the Koopa Kids were originally going to be mini-bosses in Super Princess Peach and their sprites and behavior still exist in the code, but they’re gone completely. They’re not even in cutscenes. The game could have really used some mini-bosses because the levels are so repetitive and uninspired that the forty levels are a complete slog to get through.

It’s not until the final world where the level design gets frisky enough that I sat up in my chair. Like this room does the typical “hide behind a statue” trope only with a twist: you have to be using the umbrella slow-down-your-fall move. Then, they placed enemies close by to make it an actual challenge. Well, challenge being relative. Only once in the entire run did I even get knocked down to my final heart. I was never, at any point, one single hit away from death.

My frustration with the overall milquetoast level design is further compounded by the “post game” content. Among other unlockables are a whopping TWENTY FOUR additional levels. That means over one-third of the levels that made it into the final game are locked until after you defeat Bowser. After the credits roll, you have to re-beat the bosses, giving you three additional stages per world. Some of those stages were much, much stronger than the ones in the main quest. Others were more of the same, but the fact that so many stages don’t happen until after the credits to me is more proof that something changed along the way. I would love to know the real story on this one, because the actual final product of Super Princess Peach is a mostly joyless series of samey levels that feel like the scraps of a better game.

It’s probably the easiest Bowser fight ever. Once he drops the bob-ombs, the others remain on the screen even after you score a hit. You just have to time the explosion so it happens in front of his face, but I scored all the hits in a row except one.

For every good stage in Super Princess Peach, there’s four middling ones. It’s just so….. bland. It took me three days to get through this and it wasn’t even worth it because Super Princess Peach does basically nothing interesting enough or bad enough to even get a decent review out of. Calling it “baby’s first platformer” might actually be accurate. The only audience that I imagine would find it exciting, besides the most never-say-die Nintendo diehards who would convince themselves they love Nintendo-branded colon cleaners, are very young gamers. I can’t review from their perspective and the kids in my life have aged out of being able to test that theory, but I imagine children between the ages of 6 to 8 who have very limited gaming experience might find Super Princess Peach to be the ideal break-into-2D-platforming experience. For me, I played this at some point between the ages of 16 and 17 and I remember liking it a lot more. I was sincerely excited to revisit Super Princess Peach, and now I feel like I want my time back. I was just bored. Playing it now with a critical eye, Super Princess Peach feels like a game designed for people who don’t play Nintendo games. So, I don’t think this was made specifically for girls, because I really don’t think this was made for anyone at all.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Nintendo DS Reviews, Princess Peach, Princess Peach DS, Princess Peach game, Princess Peach review, Super Princess Peach, Super Princess Peach Nintendo DS, Super Princess Peach review

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES Review) Includes Review of Quality of Life ROM Hack

March 2, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January 14, 1987 (JPN) December 1, 1988* (US)
Directed by Tadashi Sugiyama & Yasuhisa Yamamura
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Subscription

*The release window of this one is, ahem, weird.

I played the US release, which you can tell because I fought Gooma in the fifth palace. In the original Famicom Disk System version of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, this guy isn’t even in the game, and instead you fight a second version of the boss from the second palace. The trade gets stranger, as the second version of Helmet Head on FDS was moved to the second dungeon in the US, meaning you fight the 5th boss much earlier than you should. There’s a TON of other changes between the Japanese and US versions. The biggest one is that you get a lot less XP from enemies and bags on the FDS, BUT, all upgrades have a fixed and equal cost. There’s so many regional differences that Zelda II (far more than even Dracula’s Curse) is one of those games where Cutting Room Floor made a whole page just for them.

Originally, I planned to only play a quality of life ROM hack of Zelda II and make that my final word on the game, but after I beat Zelda 2 Redux and started writing up my review, this niggling little voice in my head said “Cathy, you know damn well Zelda fans are going to play tetherball with your immortal soul if you don’t do the original game too.” And now the original game is the main review and the ROM hack is the tacked-on bonus, go figure. Still, I’m actually happy that I did it this way. I’d previously tried Zelda II a couple times in my teens and didn’t like it at all. If I didn’t have this blog, I likely never would have played it again.

His full name is actually Error Unbur. He’s in hiding after shooting Alexander Hamilton.

But I do have this blog, and people seemed to like my Zelda 1 review. Of course, that’s a universally beloved game and I didn’t have any controversial opinions on it. Meanwhile, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is probably the single most polarizing 8-bit game ever. Its biggest fans really like it, while many Zelda fans call it easily the worst game in the franchise. I’m somehow between them AND also on the “worst Zelda game” boat. Well maybe not on THE boat. More like I’m being tugged on a dingy behind it while holding up flags that say “DON’T FORGET ABOUT PHANTOM HOURGLASS!” and “DON’T FORGET ABOUT SPIRIT TRACKS” and the name of the dingy is the USS F*CK TOUCH CONTROLS.

This guy, called a “Guma” behaves exactly like a Hammer Bros. from Super Mario Bros. I wonder if they just copied and pasted the code.

For some franchises, there’s usually a debate on which game in the series would wear the title of “the weird one.” Not with Zelda. The only way that happens is if some insufferably smug jackass waves the three CD-i games that were not published by Nintendo, made by non-Nintendo-approved studios, and only exist as an IOU to Phillips after Nintendo decided to cancel their partnership with them for the SNES CD-ROM. As far as Nintendo-made Zeldas go, the only real options for “the weird one” are this, the Game & Watch (which I gave a NO! to) the GameCube-to-GBA “Connectivity” release Four Sword Adventures and its Nintendo DS sibling Tri-Force Heroes, the latter two of which I’ve never really played. Except the Game & Watch is non-canon and the other two have mechanics that are unmistakably Zelda-like. Meanwhile, Zelda II was apparently never even meant to be a mainline Zelda game.

That also explains how this only came out eleven months (give or take) after the first game. They sincerely weren’t trying to make a sequel. This was supposed to be the start of something new, hence why NOTHING feels like Zelda.

Miyamoto wanted a game where you used UP and DOWN on the D-Pad for offense and defense, which wouldn’t really work in a top-down game and required a genre swap. Releasing Adventure of Link not as a spinoff but as a direct sequel Zelda 1 was made after production had already started, likely as a last second decision made once they knew the first game was a hit and they wanted to hedge their bets. Hilariously, at the time they had no clue that North America was not going to be getting the actual Super Mario 2 and instead would be getting that silly game they made with Fuji Television with a festival’s Arabian-themed characters replaced with Mario ones. I’m trying to imagine the complete shock early NES owners must have felt when the sequels to the two most popular games bore little resemblance to the games they fell in love with. It would be like making a sequel to Joker as a musical with Lady Gaga. For a lot of people, Adventure of Link is that Joker sequel: nothing like they hoped for and a complete disaster.

“Call Mario and tell him I found the Hammer Bros. suit he misplaced.”

Despite having Link, similarly-themed enemies, items, and even the laser sword at full health, Adventure of Link never feels like a Zelda game. Not even a little bit. Its closest kin up to this point? Actually, it’s probably Urban Champion, the staple of “worst Nintendo game” lists that I genuinely don’t think is that bad. Take Urban Champion’s high/low combat, significantly speed it up, and replace the bare fists with a dagger. Oh, they can call it a “sword” all they want, but again, it never feels like a sword. It has too limited range for that. Not that it’s bad or anything. Combat carries the day in Zelda II, feeling very violent, painful, and impactful thanks to excellent sound design. I dare say there’s an almost slasher-movie quality to the combat of Zelda II. They could have called this Stabby McStabface The Stab-Happy Stabber’s Adventures in Stabland because God DAMN the combat is so satisfying, and that’s before I get to the defensive side of things.

That “BEMMMM” noise that enemies make when they die is pretty visceral. It just works.

I put a LOT of stock in an action game’s defensive equation. Any studio can make a game where hitting things is satisfying and there’s plenty of bad games that do just that. Keeping players honest with well-designed attack patterns and defensive maneuvers is often what separates the good from the bad. Defense actually does matter in Zelda II. By golly, your shield is an actual shield that requires timing and positioning, but it does work. Blocking a projectile that’s about to hit you from behind with a well-timed pivot is as satisfying as the stabs are. Then there’s the combat against any of the soldier-type of enemies, whether they’re knights, skeletons, lizards, or bird creatures. It could take a lot of effort to land a shot, lending the resulting fights a cinematic quality that reminded my father of the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts. The fact that I even have to think about whether or not I like Zelda II as a whole speaks volumes to how good the combat is, because literally every other aspect of the game fails in some way.

The downward thrust feels like a prototype for DuckTales’s pogo stick, only more sadistic.

Zelda II’s structure is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Right from the start, the pacing is spectacularly off. There’s a massive gap between the first and second dungeons that includes the Death Mountain cavern maze. A maze of this type is usually a late-game trope, and while I do appreciate any game that experiments with convention, it’s just so wrongly out of place this early in the game and saps all the excitement that Zelda II had built-up to this point. As if Zelda II doesn’t already hurt badly enough for having to manually exit every single cave you enter even though big enemies don’t respawn. I think the idea is that it’s supposed to make the game more immersive because if you explore a cave in real life, you don’t just magically teleport out when you’re done. Yeah? Cool, which is why I don’t explore caves in real life and instead spend my free time playing FANTASY video games.

The manually-exiting part of the equation might be one of the biggest problems because it turns even the act of getting key items into at least 50% slog of walking through now-empty corridors that you literally just walked through.

And it’s not like the level one-to-level two structure was a one-off blip. The stuff you must do between each of the remaining dungeons is equally nonsensically paced-out. Sometimes the next step after beating one dungeon is making your way directly to the next one. For sh*ts and giggles, I’ll just count the steps in StrategyWiki’s Zelda II walkthrough. While there’s some wiggle room in specific steps, this still gives a fairly accurate snapshot of Zelda II’s one-game crusade against the concept of game flow.

Starting the game to (#1) Parapa Palace: 3 steps split into 5 parts.
Parapa Palace to (#2) Midoro Palace: 8 steps split into 21 parts.
Midoro Palace to (#3) Island Palace: 1 step split into 3 parts.
Island Palace to (#4) Maze Palace: 7 steps split into 12 parts.
Maze Palace to (#5) Ocean Palace: 1 step split into 2 parts.
Ocean Palace to (#6) Hidden Palace: 5 steps split into 12 parts.
Hidden Palace to (#7) Great Palace: 1 step divided into 2 parts.

Update: Yes, you don’t have to go through Death Mountain between levels 1 and 2. I assume the guide I used put the highest premium on building up your life/magic. As I noted, there’s some wiggle room, and regardless, other palaces will have inconsistent spacing.

The entire lead-up to the Great Palace is super repetitive and super boring. The series of caves you have to enter are identical in layout with only the enemies changing. What would have made a LOT more sense would have been to place the maze here and have this dull-ass area be the lead-up to the second level. It’s one of the most anti-climatic build-ups to a finale on the NES, and you know they were capable of better because Super Mario 1 and Zelda 1 did it nearly perfect.

So even if you ignore the change in genre and the tacked-on experience system, Zelda II is deeply problematic just in terms of spacing-out the big, key moments. And then there’s the actual design of the dungeons, which doesn’t do a lot to alleviate the tedium. Although Zelda II’s dungeons are better than the mansions in Simon’s Quest, the two share a lot in common in that the format is too limited. Most of the rooms are just corridors, and the enemy placement becomes predictable. There’s not a lot in the way of clever structural design. You walk to the end of one hallway until you find a key, a lock, or a dead end, then you find an elevator and do it all over again. Besides the ramped-up final dungeon, only level six (Hidden Palace) really stood out as “strongly designed” in terms of layout because exploration leaned heavier into trying things the other dungeons didn’t do, including a clever bit where you have to quickly cast a spell as soon as you enter a room that works because there’s no tangible penalty for not figuring it out immediately.

These guys that I called “cloakies” only show up in the fifth dungeon and were a big part of why I think that dungeon was the hardest of the original six. Another problem with Zelda II is that it scales poorly. Even if there was no level-up system, it would be all wrong. This is actually the rare problem that both the first Zelda games share. I love Zelda 1 with all my heart, but man, that game has a horribly inaccurate difficulty curve. As bad as Zelda II can be in every aspect but combat, the curve is actually slightly better than Zelda 1’s, though both are bottom-tier among Nintendo difficulty curves.

Otherwise, there’s just too many flat rooms and dead ends. The good news is that enemies in the dungeons are typically the strongest in terms of design and threat. BUT, just like the caves in the overworld, major enemies don’t respawn unless you leave the dungeon entirely, which wasn’t wise given the amount of backtracking that finding your way through a dungeon can require. This is no doubt tied to the level-up system that adds absolutely nothing to the game. The enemies that are the most fun to fight also pay-off the highest, and even by 1987, Nintendo knew they had to prevent grinding. Zelda II was released in the wake of Dragon Quest blowing up the Famicom scene, and Nintendo wanted some of that chowder. They should have recognized that there’s a big difference between turn-based games and action-oriented ones. There’s no excuse either, because the entire stated point of the gameplay was the combat, but the steps taken to prevent grinding also assured that a LOT of combat would be removed. The better answer would have been to just drastically reduce the value of enemies. Did the knights really need to pay between 50XP and 150XP? And it’s all for naught as the system is easy to exploit anyway. It was a BAD idea to automatically grant you the next level up when you finish a level and it’s SO easy to abuse.

Oddly enough, these things were the hardest part of Zelda II for me, and it’s not even close. They respawn endlessly in packs of three, move slowly and fire shots both high and low. When combined with the cloakies, I think they become the most dangerous combat situation in any 2D Zelda.

And that brings me to the biggest problem of Zelda II: too much of it feels like it’s trying to please fans of all games at the expense of the core concept. The platforming is there for Super Mario fans. The XP system is there for Dragon Quest fans. What’s there for Zelda fans? Well, sprites that are based on enemies from that game, but no actual gameplay of substance. It didn’t have to be that way, either. Instead of an XP system, I would have easily preferred finding upgrades to your sword, shield, and armor through items found via exploration. One thing about RPGs is that leveling up isn’t an event in the same way an item find, a boss battle, or a new area opening up to exploration is. In Zelda 1, getting the White Sword and Magic Sword are big deals. That’s out the window here. The attempts at replacing those situations with things like the lost child, the water of life, etc, fall flat because those are one-off fetch quests. You don’t know you’re getting the fairy spell when you get the water of life. It’s sprung on you after the fact. Instead of taking the water back to the village, following clues that takes you to an item that gives you that ability would have been SO much cooler.

I want to say that Zelda II has eight strongly-designed bosses for seven levels, running the table on memorable designs and battle tactics. If they don’t land as hard as they should, it has nothing to do with the bosses themselves but rather the overall poor pacing of the game. When I did Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition back in July of 2024, some of my favorite parts of that were the Zelda II challenges. Unfortunately, only three of the bosses (Horsehead, the mounted knight, and the dragon) appear in NWC NES Edition out of fifteen total Zelda II challenges. Even when it appears in other games Zelda II manages to disappoint.

There’s plenty of other examples of pacing opportunities that were sacrificed to the experience system. Late in the game, enemies start spitting fireballs at you that your shield can’t block natively. You have to cast the REFLECT spell, which literally makes no sense since you’re not actually reflecting those types of shots. The only REFLECTing happens in the fourth level (and a couple rooms in the sixth level), where the magic waves shot by Wizzrobes and the giant wizard boss Carock must be used against them. They could have easily hid a fire shield somewhere in the gigantic but mostly barren overworld that protects against fireballs, which would be a big item for the final level where seemingly everything spits fire instead of laser balls, but nope. That’s what really gets me most of all: Zelda 1 is overflowing with hidden stuff. In Zelda II, what little hidden stuff there is feels samey and underwhelming. The only upgrades happen via leveling-up, and you never know when that’ll happen. It’s out of the design’s hands, which is why the pacing is so awful.

If the random encounters didn’t have a very limited number of preset layouts, MAYBE I could have gotten behind it. But every random encounter is so flat and uninteresting that eventually I found myself trying to avoid them. By the way, that was the deciding factor in this close verdict.

As a sequel to Legend of Zelda, the stuff added like the level system, magic spells, and random encounters are so underwhelming in comparison to the things that define Zelda that aren’t here, like bombs, arrows, rupee collecting, and in-game items. Every item you get in Zelda II is passive, or used only in the overworld. Only the magic spells buff combat, and they only work for the specific screen you’re on. Like, you can’t kill the spiders or the things that I literally just found out at this moment are Zoras without the fire magic. But there’s only a couple enemies you need the fire magic to kill per screen, then you have to cast it all over again. They fixed this with A Link to the Past, removing the middleman and just having every magic item take a tiny bit of magic to use, but that doesn’t really help Zelda II’s experience, does it?

You mean to tell me that sticking that gigantic eye with a sword isn’t lethal? Technically the magic spells are things that you have to find, but they don’t have the same feeling of achievement like those items do. Instead of limiting players to the fire to kill these things, a sword upgrade that’s found as an item would have worked so much better and added some much needed big moments to the pacing. Plus, the magic system comes with other problems. There’s way too many magic refill drops, even when you have a full magic bar. There’s nothing more annoying than killing a high-paying enemy only for the f*cking thing to drop magic instead of granting XP.

Now that I’ve finished some version of Zelda II three times (I beat the ROM hack I’m about to review a few years ago), I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of the hatred for Zelda II wouldn’t exist if this was anything but the sequel to The Legend of Zelda. Had they ditched Link, Zelda, and the Triforce and called this anything else, I think it would be remembered as an average early NES adventure. One that was made too early in the genre to fully understand how to implement things like XP systems or how to properly craft the world of an adventure of this scale. Instead of being the red-headed stepchild of Zelda, it would instead be more like Kid Icarus or Metroid. A worthy experiment that didn’t age well, and certainly not some kind of instant masterpiece like Nintendo’s best work up to this point, but not a disaster.

The lives system is silly too. There’s only a small handful of 1ups hidden in the game. After you’ve reached level 8 on every upgrade, any future leveling grants a 1up. I assume having these not be rare item drops was another misguided attempt at preventing grinding.

Even Miyamoto himself calls Zelda II a “sort of failure” and one of the few games Nintendo did that didn’t get better and better as development went along. I’m not going to argue with him so I’m giving Adventure of Link a NO!, but it was closer than I expected. I’m always fascinated by those kinds of opinions from legendary media figures, like how Spielberg hated Hook or how Walt Disney said Alice in Wonderland had no heart. My film buff sister said “the funny thing about both of those? If you had to pick which film from their bodies of work those quotes would be about, I think most people would pick the right ones even without knowing the context.” Neither Hook nor Alice in Wonderland are bad. Zelda II is to Nintendo’s library what those films are to their respective creators. It’s not actively bad so much as it makes too many fatal mistakes that make a potentially good game boring.

Imagine if this had become the predominant style of Zelda. I enjoyed the combat, but still, oof.

As cathartic as the dagger is (I still refuse to call it a sword), it can’t carry a game of this size and this structure over the finish line by itself. I realized this because eventually I did reach the point where I avoided enemies and random encounters because I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t enjoy the overworld, the towns, the magic, or really even the dungeons at all. Honestly, the verdict should never have even been up for debate. The combat wasn’t so much the saving grace as it was the life support machine that kept the body fresh while it awaited organ harvesting for better games yet to come. That’s why there’s a tragedy to Zelda II. It was made early enough in the action-RPG genre that it was certainly a game that led to many valuable lessons on what NOT to do that made future games better. But for Nintendo, this was it. They never really did another game like it. Had Adventure of Link been an entirely new IP, a sequel based on it that applied all the lessons they learned making it could have been truly outstanding. But, because they tied the Zelda brand to it, the only lesson they learned was to never do that again. I’m not a fan of any studio taking that lesson from a worthy experiment.
Verdict: NO!

If you’re wondering why I didn’t talk about the legendary difficulty of Zelda II, it’s because this review isn’t over.

BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW

Zelda 2: Redux
Released December 14, 2021 and updated July 25, 2023
Unauthorized Quality of Life ROM hack of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Remaster designed by ShadowOne333
Link to Patch at ROMHacking.Net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

In side-by-side comparisons, the original Zelda II is always on the left while Zelda 2 Redux is always on the right.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Zelda 2 Redux

The first time I beat Zelda II, it wasn’t THE Zelda II my readers grew up with. It was this ROM hack that contains over forty changes. So many changes great and small that are made to improve the experience that I can’t even list them all, but I’ll talk about the big ones. In addition to a better sprite for Link, the HUD is much more Zelda-like. The health bar is replaced with the traditional Zelda hearts, and your upgrades are better represented. The names of those upgrades, along with the “SPELL” spell are changed to be better reflective of what they do. Now SPELL is instead ENIGMA, and the level-up screen looks like this:

Zelda 2 Redux

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The next biggest change is that every enemy grants XP. Endlessly-respawning enemies like Moblins that you see in random encounters provide no XP. Now, they give 2 points a piece and allow players to grind to their heart’s content. The little jumping kangaroo guys in the dungeons (apparently they’re wolves) also pay off 2XP each. In the original build of Zelda II, this isn’t a big deal after the opening twenty to thirty minutes, but it does allow players to power-up a little stronger than natural for the first dungeon. XP payouts have been adjusted too, so like those floating, spongy-ass unicorn heads now pay out 30XP instead of 20XP. Enemies that stole XP when you got hit by them no longer do.

The script has been cleaned up as well to be truer to the original intent. Hints are less vague. Spells and new moves like the down-thrust and up-thrust are now very specifically explained.

The most important change for most players will be toning back the difficulty. Enemies have been rebalanced, but that might have been a slight overkill since just changing the cost of performing magic was lowered. That should be helpful enough because using the healing spell doesn’t take half your magic supply. The fireballs from the FIRE spell have been sped-up, a subtle change that yields big results in both gameplay and satisfaction. Enemies also drop more magic bottles, which I found annoying in the main game AND the ROM hack, as ideally that would stop if you already had a full bar. Also the floating unicorn heads and especially the bubbles have had their health reduced. I personally think their XP should have been lowered significantly (I feel that way about all XP) but it is what it is.

The game’s NOT totally nerfed. Enemies that pose serious risk, including my arch enemies pictured here, are still dangerous. I mean, you’d have to be a complete f*cking moron to actually die at all by time you’re as strong as I am in this pic because magic spells like HEAL are much cheaper. Yep, I died in this room.

For those players from the 80s and early 90s who think Zelda II was too hard, first off, did you have a good strategy guide? Because I found that the walkthrough at StrategyWiki was nearly as effective as this ROM hack. If you did have a guide and it didn’t help, set your expectations accordingly and give Zelda 2 Redux a try, especially if your biggest problem with the design was the difficulty. Like I did with the Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest ROM hack in that review, I’m giving Zelda 2 Redux an honorary YES! for the patch even if the game gets a NO! It’s not a miracle worker, but it does address the most common complaint about Zelda II in a way that I think works as an effective “easy mode.” Like with Simon’s Quest, I’m grateful for the ROM hack because it exposed that Zelda II’s biggest problems have nothing to do with the main thing people have complained about for years. With Simon’s Quest, it was the vagueness, translation, and clunky interface, and the game was still bad when those things (and more) were fixed. Zelda II’s biggest complaint is the brutal difficulty, and it IS a hard game. I think at times Redux goes too far, but I always prefer a game to be too easy instead of too hard because at least with too easy, EVERYONE can experience the game in its entirety.

Since I didn’t mention it anywhere else, Link’s Shadow is a great final boss. I like that the game went with a final boss centered around the attack/counterattack system that kept me going back and forth on my verdict long after my actual play session had ended. This whole format deserved a better game.

But Redux’s fixes also prove that Zelda II is just a deeply flawed game in ways a quality of life ROM hack could never fix. Turning Zelda II into an outright good game would require radical changes that go against developer intent. The historically God-awful pacing? That’s still a problem, obviously. So is the boring level design, the foolish XP system, the dullness of the return trip through any cave, the poor ordering of levels, the lack of things to “solve” in a way that feels true to the Zelda brand, and even the structure of the game flow itself. Unless ShadowOne333 was somehow able to stick the Death Mountain maze as the finale before the Great Palace or change the order of the dungeons, this was just going to be a bad game.

(shrug) It’s a boring map that contains a mostly boring game. It could have been even worse, too. In the Famicom Disk System original, there’s only one single background for the dungeons, the bricks seen in the first level, that’s palette-swapped in new levels.

The only reason Zelda II isn’t worse, and actually the only reason it’s not in the discussion for Nintendo’s worst action-adventure game, is because it has some very, very good combat. Combat that holds up almost forty years later. While I ultimately gave Zelda II: The Adventure of Link a NO!, I actually had to think about it for quite a while. That’s how good the offensive/defensive system is. It’s a system that could be built off of. Gaming has come so far over the last four decades. A game like this now would be paced much better. Developers would know to play test it extensively, measure the gaps between levels, and adjust accordingly. They were probably just happy to have the thing up and running. Really, a lot of Zelda II’s problems are a product of when it was made. Zelda II is a trailblazer, and one of the drawbacks to that is that it doesn’t have much in the way of a roadmap for what to do and what NOT to do. Instead, it IS the roadmap, and while I didn’t have more fun than not (which is the only thing a game needs to do to get a YES! at IGC), I think Zelda II did leave gaming better than it found it. So, cheers to you, Zelda II and to the whole community that tried hard to make it better. But, there’s really only one way to do that: a direct sequel. I’m guessing that’ll never happen but I’ll cross my fingers, just in case.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Adventure of Link Review, Link, NES Reviews, ROM hack reviews, Switch Online Reviews, Zelda 2, Zelda 2 Redux review, Zelda II, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link NES, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Review

Total Recall (NES Review)

February 26, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Total Recall
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August, 1990
Developed by Interplay
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Having met enough game designers from this era that worked with licensed properties for Acclaim-published games, I have a hunch that a nightmare development deadline factored into Total Recall being a complete trash fire of a game. The movie came out in June of 1990, and the NES game was on store shelves before that summer was over. But that’s no excuse because there is NOTHING about a nightmare deadline that should cause a developer to do things that Total Recall does.

After my week-and-a-half vacation from IGC (part of which was spent updating The Pinball Chick) I struggled to figure out what to review. I’m just about burned-out on Lolo. My Classic Video Pinball Games: The Definitive Review is over ninety games big and counting, so it’s going to take, you know, lots and lots of time (it’s likely to be my 15th Anniversary feature, because f*ck it, it’s not possible to top last year’s Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review). Out of ideas, I hit the “select a random game” button a few times and eventually it spit-out Total Recall, the 1990 NES game that’s usually considered one of the worst games on the entire console. Hey, a game that takes an hour to beat, and at least the timing makes sense. I just reviewed the enhanced edition of Jaws, which improved upon the already secretly okay 1987 original release that was unfairly vilified. And I’ve heard from at least a couple people that Total Recall didn’t deserve its spot on numerous “worst of” lists. Those people are wrong, by the way. Total Recall was my much-needed reminder why licensed NES games have a scathing reputation.

I need to watch the movie closer because I must have missed the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up Phil Fondacaro.

I can say exactly one positive thing about Total Recall: it follows the plot of the movie relatively well. I mean, as well as an 8-bit platforming action game can be expected to. All the major set-pieces are here: the trip to Rekall and guys pulling him out to fight with him (though it’s not staged anything like scene from the movie), the fight with Sharon Stone in the apartment, the trip to Mars, the journey to the caverns, and the alien device that can restore an atmosphere to the planet. You can even die if you shoot the device too many times while fighting the last boss. Nice touch. No notes. Okay, so the Johnny Cab and the three-boobed chick are missing (Arnold’s sprite does have two very prominent boobs, though), but there’s a somewhat visually impressive version of the famous x-ray scene:

For God’s sake, don’t mistake this for being fun, because it ain’t. AND WHAT IS THAT SKELETON? Are the enemies all Cro-Magnon? This screenshot looks like it could be from a Simpsons game and that’s what Homer’s sprite looks like.

So they did a good enough job of making a product that unambiguously passes for being an eight-bit action game based on a specific movie. When I showed my sister the Back to the Future game without telling her what it was, she guessed Grease and Happy Days. I screwed up doing the same guessing game for Total Recall, but I think anyone who has seen Total Recall could probably guess what this is eventually, especially with the X-Ray scene. You know what? That’s not nothing and props to them. I assume the development team must have gotten to see the movie early. I hope so, at least, because that means someone had fun related to this game. Yeah, I’m done saying nice things about Total Recall. It deserves its reputation.

Out of nowhere, there’s a relatively short top-down driving section that controls TERRIBLY and has awful combat. I mean enemies literally spawn out of thin air BEHIND YOU and start life-slapping your health. You can’t really defend against it since you have to heel-toe your way through the course that’s filled heavily with tight squeezes. Even grazing a wall at a low speed sucks your health. At least the platforming sections sometimes rise to the level of simply being bland and/or boring. If the driving section was the entire game, I think people would talk about Total Recall as a top contender for “worst NES game.” It’s horrendous.

Literally every gameplay element of Total Recall is boring. At its very best, some levels are maybe mediocre. Maybe. Besides the tiny driving area mentioned above, Total Recall is mostly an action-platformer. You punch and jump, and if you pick up a weapon you can pause the game to equip it. Guns have unlimited ammo and some enemies die from one hit while others soak up damage like bullets are their natural source of nutrition. As long as the action is fun, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. But Total Recall’s violence has no sense of weight to it, mostly owed to awful sound design and a lack of animation frames. So punches have no OOMPH and shooting baddies isn’t cathartic, flushing the entire point of games like this down the crapper. Given that Total Recall the movie is delightfully violent, it’s a big letdown, and that’s before I even get to the enemies.

In this area of the game, you walk left, duck and punch a dog (it runs away instead of dying. The devs weren’t complete dicks), then stand up and punch a baddie. Then you walk left another screen and do it again, then again, until the level ends. If you’re going to have THAT type of design, you better have satisfying combat.

The enemies tend to fall into three categories: cannon fodder, annoying animals, or cheap shot artists. The animals get their own category because in one level cats literally rain from the sky on you and if you’re standing in the wrong place, you have no chance of preventing them from latching onto you and draining your health. I suppose you can lump them in with the cheap shot artists, who spam attacks in a way where avoiding damage isn’t reasonable. Enemy placement is based around crowding players and scoring as many shots that no one can reasonably expect to avoid as possible.

The level design is mostly like Total Recall if it was instead a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Rooms and backgrounds repeat with identical layouts and enemy placement over and over.

Some of the gameplay mechanics don’t even seem to work right. At one point, you have to just go through a door. Every other door in the game was a cinch to go through. Just press UP. For whatever reason, with this door, which opens and closes in intervals, you have to jump and press UP, and it’s like a low-percentage RNG on if it’ll actually work. I literally needed several lives to actually get it to activate, and when it finally worked, I don’t know what I did that time that I hadn’t already been doing for about the last five f*cking minutes. Mind you, every time the door opens a drunk is thrown out the door AT YOU that’s nearly impossible to avoid and costs you health.

Drunk being throws out of bar.

This is shameful, really.

Now that I think about it, every level’s climax was a disaster. The second-to-last boss is Benny with his giant drill thing from the movie, and you have to shoot him in the head. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? That’s a boilerplate video game type of challenge. Did I mention you have to jump up and shoot? Well, you do. Still sounds reasonable though, right? OH, and Benny doesn’t always have his head exposed. He pops up and down like a prairie dog. Okay, still within the realms of not-unreasonable game design. OH, and he takes about a dozen shots to kill. AND his hit box is really tiny. AND AND AND you only get so many attempts before he stops faking like he’s going to ram you and actually does it, so you need to get two hits per pass or you won’t have enough time to win the fight. Still not sounding ruinous enough? Well, it gets even worse, because the ceiling for nearly half of the boss arena is actually too low to allow you to jump at all and that’s the area he mostly has his head sticking out. You only get a split second window of vulnerability in the area where you can actually jump. And that’s how you turn a great idea for a boss into an all-time terrible boss. Bravo.

See? There’s no way to hit him right now. When he backs out of here, he’ll lower his head into the machine and be invincible for a while. The saddest part? In the movie, it’s one of those scenes where it’s not hard to imagine the people behind the scenes saying “this part will be PERFECT for the video game” and they completely f*cked it up. It was actually stunning how bad this was, and given how low my expectations were at this point in the game, holy f*ck.

That’s par for the course with Total Recall’s “action.” No finesse. No elegance. No fun, either. At one point, you have to fight your pretend wife and then a guy appears at the door and begins shooting a literal stream of bullets without taking a break. He can’t die and his bullets are too perfectly spaced and move too quickly to avoid. Worst of all, you don’t even get the satisfaction of fighting him. Once you win the fight with Sharon Stone, you just have to make your way to the door he’s firing from and the level is over. Given how fast your health drains, that might not be easy, but that’s how you win it. WHAT THE F*CK WAS THAT? So like I said above, you can’t blame the deadline because this is a bad idea whether you have a month to spec-out the game or a year, and if you don’t instinctively know that, you shouldn’t be making video games.

Okay, so this scene is straight from the movie and, again, that’s commendable. On the other hand, did the developers actually have fun playing this? Was that even a goal or just something they were crossing their fingers and hoping for?

Another boss rapidly throws a hard-to-avoid hat at you that returns to him and covers basically the entire platform he’s on. Mind you, the level that this guy was the boss of is probably the highlight of the game. Remember the scene where Quaid meets the mysterious guy who tells him to wrap a wet towel around his head so he can shove the thing up his nose and get the tracking bug out of his head? This level is apparently based on that and sees you killing homeless people, each of whom is warming by a fire. Okay, maybe the game’s progress isn’t THAT close to the movie.

I somehow took this screenshot at the exact right moment that it looks like I’m holding a ventriloquist dummy. WELL DOESN’T IT? “You’re a choir boy compared to me! A CHOIR BOY!” Arnold Schwarzenegger as a ventriloquist. I would pay to see that.

Anyway, hat throwing guy is immune to gunfire, so you have to get directly next to a guy who throws a projectile capable of covering basically the entire area he’s located, making avoiding damage seemingly impossible. I still managed to land about eight or nine hits, but even though I went into the fight with six bars of health, he was too relentless and I finally died. Thankfully, I laid down a save state so I reloaded and tried again. And again. And again. Eventually I gave up and decided I must have been doing something wrong. I wasn’t, as punching him is how you beat him. Okay, so the eight or nine shots weren’t enough to win. How many does it take? Ten? Twenty? Nope. I counted forty-four punches. FORTY-FOUR! And those are only the ones that actually landed. He has invincible frames too. Are you f*cking kidding me? I don’t even see how it would be possible to win the fight if not for what seems like a glitch.

I hope it’s a glitch, because if not, this would be one of the dumbest intentional boss designs of all-time. When you climb down the ladder to the boss chamber, he starts to walk closer to you. If you attempt to run away, he’ll just keep walking back and forth. You have to climb down the ladder once he’s to the left of it. Then, he’ll throw his hat, which doesn’t return because he threw it off screen. He gets caught in a cycle of throwing the hat that allows you to go to town on him without him retaliating. Just punch him forty-four times and you win. Only forty-four? Wow! Christmas came early this year!

Despite having nothing positive to say about Total Recall from a gameplay perspective, I’ve played a lot worse licensed NES games than this. Where’s Waldo, Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates, and Hudson Hawk are easily inferior. I’d put Total Recall somewhere between those and games like Karate Kid or NES Back to the Future: nearly competent (in Total Recall’s case, that’s being VERY kind) and follows the movie more loyally than you would expect from this genre in this era, but uninspired conceptually, blandly designed, and boring to play. I have a mental exercise I like to do with games like this. What if you could swap out the Total Recall engine for, say, Contra’s? For this exercise, you have to imagine punching is an option in Contra, but otherwise, keep the entire layout the same, but imagine “what if Total Recall controlled like Contra? What if the guns fired like Contra’s? What if the violence was as satisfying as Contra’s?” It still wouldn’t make a difference. Total Recall would be better in terms of player-to-game interface, but it’d still be boring because the level design is boring, the bosses are boring, and basic enemy movement, attack patterns, and placement are all boring. On top of all that, it’s an ugly game, too. It just looks bland, doesn’t it?

My friend Luke nailed it when he said this looks more like Ed O’Neil. Can’t be unseen, either. Or maybe it’s Peter Weller. Mat said Peter Weller. Crap, he might be right.

This is where the nightmare deadline likely factors in, right? The team behind this probably had to sketch out a design that was doable in a limited amount of time and get a full working game out in just a few months. Except, in Total Recall’s case, there’s so little gameplay here that it shouldn’t have been that hard to polish it up to be, at the very least, okay. It’s what Jaws did (Jaws only took one month to finish), and if they can do it, surely Total Recall, a movie that lends itself better to video games, should be easier for that kind of quick cash grab. I’ve played plenty of bad games where I just can’t imagine anyone who worked on the game thought they had actually made a good game, and Total Recall is like that. It’s a soulless product that’s made to sell on the name value alone that just needed one or two levels where a screenshot in a print ad could look decent enough. There’s NO ambition beyond having a couple movie-accurate set pieces that you can build a movie tie-in advertising campaign around.

In a screenshot of the final level, Total Recall almost looks fun. Certainly a game anyone would want to at least check out. And that’s a bad thing because it’s NOT good. This whole section is janky and full of hard-to-see platforms and cheap enemies.

The best developers still manage to be ambitious. Another game published on the notorious Acclaim licensed deadline, The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Space Mutants, pulled off what Total Recall did (fit plenty of source material-accurate gags into the game) while still having a ton of ambition and deep gameplay concepts that fit the license like a glove. Sure, Bart vs. The Space Mutants isn’t any good, but with enough time, it could have been. There’s even a quality of life ROM hack of that game’s Genesis port that proves it beyond any doubt (I reviewed the ROM hack and the original game in The Simpsons Video Games: The Definitive Review). Total Recall can’t be fixed like that. It’s a paint-by-numbers piece of shovelwear. A game that only exists by contractual obligation, presumably developed by the lowest bidder. So maybe it’s not one of THE worst NES games I’ve played, but it’s certainly one of the most cynical.
Verdict: NO!

WHAT IS WITH THAT SPRITE? He’s got boobs! “Milk is for babies….. MARIA! BRING ME A BABY! I’M LACTATING!”

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Arnold Schwarzenegger games, Arnold Schwarzenegger NES, Licensed Games, Licensed NES Games, NES Games based on movies, NES Reviews, Nintendo Games based on movies, Total Recall, Total Recall Game, Total Recall Game Review, Total Recall NES, Total Recall NES Review, Total Recall Nintendo, Total Recall Video Game, Worst NES Games

What I’m Playing – February 2026

February 23, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

I’m FINALLY going to do these damn games. For real this time.

Hey everyone! The kids had last week off school so we spent the week doing family things, and that included Angela and Sasha helping to knock out some pinball projects. For the first time since July, The Pinball Chick got updated with six new reviews. Instead of posting one gigantic feature on the forty Zaccaria Retro pins, I decided to let them trickle out slowly since the amount of time I get with my family to do these features can be limited. Again, I hadn’t updated The Pinball Chick since July! Check out our thoughts on some tables from the Zaccaria Retro line. Aerobatic Retro, Black Belt Retro, Cine Star Retro, Circus Retro, Clown Retro, and Combat Retro. The next one will drop tomorrow. And there’s so many more pins that I doubt we can ever catch up. We’re going to be checking out the Blood West lineup next.

(Zaccaria Pinball) Blood West Remake – aka Dot Matrix Display

(Zaccaria Pinball) Blood West Retro

(Zaccaria Pinball) Blood West Solid State

(Zaccaria Pinball) Blood West Deluxe

More updates will trickle out at The Pinball Chick from now on. We tortured ourselves with the pitiful Zaccaria Retro line, but actual good Zaccaria table reviews are coming too. Okay, so their AI art is sometimes eye-rolling, but nobody can accuse the designers of lack of ambition with their actual table layouts. In fact, Magic Pixel started a new line for Zaccaria Pinball, called the EM+ pins. They’re kind of like saying “what if they had a 2000’s design mentality in the 60’s/70’s, before solid state was invented?” We’re still working our way through them, but so far we really enjoyed Combat EM+, collectively rating it a 4.0 out of 5 (the votes are still coming in though). Here’s the EM+ line, which is sold in packs of four for $7.99 on Steam. These tables are coming soon to AtGames Legends Pinball too. Also, we have a new team member, Matt. Because of him, we can now do the Olympic style “highest and lowest scores are eliminated” format that I’ve been dying to do.

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We probably have pinball on our mind because of the recent announcement of Pokemon by Stern. None of the Vice Family have gotten to play Pokemon yet and probably won’t until around April, but our friend and Pinball Chick Team member Dave Sanders wanted to share some thoughts on it. “Stern’s Pokemon is the most family-oriented pin ever released, and it’s based on the most valuable long-running all-ages IP in the world. All Stern had to do to succeed was get that part right. In recent years, their tables have geared towards tournament players or serious collectors in their own right with complex layouts or a large number of tighter shots. This is the one that doesn’t. It’s a less-is-more, pick-up-and-play layout that anyone can walk up and start flipping. The thing is, Pokémon was ALWAYS going to be the game where, in advance, you had a firm idea of whether you wanted it or not, if you were invested heavily in the IP already, or have kids that are (the screen uses a lot of material and clips from the cartoon show). It’s a machine built for simpler game-to-game fun that knows exactly where to stop.” Here’s the trailer and, yeah, it looks fun. I think this will be the first pin of the 21st century to break 10,000 units sold.

Now, I intended to review Pokemon Pinball for Game Boy Color, but then I remembered that I had created the template for Classic Video Pinball: The Definitive Review and I decided to start working on that instead. And, I’m doing it solo without my friends and family. They offered, but I want to do this one by myself. Oh, I’m sure Dave will be in my ear most of the time, but these are VIDEO GAMES where the genre is pinball, and despite having my own digital pinball blog, I never played video pinball games as a child because I grew up with real tables and the angles never felt life-like to me. I think the first time I actually thought “this feels like real pinball” was Metroid Prime Pinball. It sure wasn’t Pokemon Pinball for GBC.

Look how big the ball is compared to the flippers in the original Game Boy Color version of Pokemon Pinball. It makes finding the correct angle so weird, especially when so much of the ball touches the flipper at once. The Game Boy Advance sequel was much, much better.

And for you pinball haters, don’t sweat it. I’ve got reviews coming for Adventures of Lolo and its Japanese counterpart Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu. I’m pairing them together because most of the puzzles from the US version of Adventures of Lolo were cut and pasted from the Japanese game, which is set in a gigantic maze similar to Eggerland for the Famicom Disk System. I finished the US Lolo rather quickly and I’m close to finishing the Eggerland sequel. I’m stunned that my previous Eggerland reviews did so well, but I thank everyone for that.

Sigh. No, they didn’t fix the speed or style of the water levels. If Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu gets a NO!, these will be a big part of the reason why. I guess for this genre I just prefer the American Lolo style of “beat a room, go to the next room.”

For those who want something a little meatier, I think I might finally play Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and other action-RPGs for review. I’ve avoided them because they’re a pretty big time investment, but hell, I’m spending 10+ hours on single digital pinball tables. I might as well start getting reviews up for the games people request most. Do you have a favorite classic action RPG? Let me know! Then again, I already beat A Link to the Past in under 5 minutes so maybe I should play something else.

But what a five minutes! Verdict: YES!

Filed under Editorials, What I'm Playing

Jaws Retro Edition (Review)

February 15, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Jaws Retro Edition
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC
Released February 13, 2026
Authorized Nintendo Entertainment System ROM Hack
Originally Developed by Westone
“Enhanced Edition” Designed by Jeremy Parish
Published by Limited Run Games
$14.99 jumped the shark in the making of this review.
This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2

This is really just a review of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, the ROM hack included in Jaws Retro Edition alongside the original game. Make sure to read my original review of Jaws for the NES. That game is included in this package and all the reasons why I awarded it a YES! are unchanged. I played one quick round. It was still okay. There is one small quality-of-life update to the original game: you can now pick-up seashells on the edges of the screen. Well, at least you can as the diver. Still can’t with the sub. Before I get to the review of the new game, let’s talk about the emulator.

Since this isn’t EXACTLY a retro collection despite having two games, I’m going to do a quick summary of the Special Features in this caption. Please note the lack of LJN logos or branding in the special features. You get a heavily censored ad, box art (no Nintendo seal of quality, either), the original instruction book, plus a jukebox with all the music and sound effects. There’s also a CRT filter and three different borders (four if you count no border at all) and three aspect ratios. Pretty basic set of extras. Nothing to write home about, but I’m happy what’s here is here.

Jaws Retro Edition features a solid emulator with one damning omission. It gets the job done with a clean menu that offers a single save state file per game (two games total: Jaws and Jaws: Enhanced Edition) and plenty of rewind buffer. BUT, it’s missing a couple very important gems to be a true Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. In fact, it might be missing the single most important feature of them all: button remapping. Oof. Remapping isn’t just an emulation feature but an important accessibility option. Were I to treat this the same way I would review a retro collection, I would stiffly penalize the entire set for it, probably awarding half the maximum value since button remapping is required for players to comfortably connect to the game on their terms.

I think it’s great that they included a warning to do the saving manually. Even Digital Eclipse missed that.

There’s also no quick save or quick load, which I prefer to menu-based save states features. Quick save/load is often missing in most collections so I’m used to it, and there’s also no jump-in full gameplay videos. Given the random nature of Jaws, I didn’t expect it and don’t miss it. Finally, because of how Enhanced Edition is designed where getting automatic fire is an upgrade you have to purchase, they had to not include autofire as an emulation option by necessity. I don’t like that. To me, autofire is an accessibility feature, not a gameplay feature, especially in a game like Jaws that requires so much nonstop shooting at times. But overall the emulator does a good enough job to not ruin the game, and really I guess that’s all I should hope for. Now, with all of that out of the way, the real reason to buy Jaws Retro Edition is that the original 1987 NES game has been reworked and expanded. The included ROM hack, Jaws: Enhanced Edition, is one the greatest ROM hacks of all-time.

Very cool.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition was designed by the man I consider gaming’s most underrated personality and my personal favorite gaming content creator: Jeremy Parish. I even made my own NES Works playlist. I mean I sort of had to since, for whatever reason, he included the intolerable Athena soundtrack in the chronological playlist, even though it makes no f*cking sense because it’s not content HE made and offers none of the history lessons people presumably subscribe to his channel for. It’s just….. noise. Horrible, horrible noise generated from one of the worst video games ever made. I’m already someone who, to the annoyance of my readers, plays most games muted or with the volume very low. I would never listen to an NES soundtrack for fun, even the ones I like. But history lessons on games? I love those, and Parish does some damn insightful ones, always providing the background of games in ways that are entertaining and forthright. He’s a historian who has, gasp, opinions. As a holder of many opinions, I like that. Hell, we both felt Jaws was very Atari-like in its design, and now I’m honestly wondering if I came to that realization on my own or my brain absorbed it from his video. If you’ve never seen NES Works, here’s his Jaws/Karate Kid video. We certainly disagree about Karate Kid. Oh, it’s bad and I gave it a NO! because I’m not insane, but I think it could have gone down as a solid game with some minor fine tuning, while he considered it one of the worst NES games up to that point. Oh come on, it’s not THAT bad, Jeremy.

Anyway, the Athena soundtrack story, and it’s a true story: years ago, I was in a nice, deep sleep during a week when I was green with the flu. I was so sick that it was a tiny miracle that I’d been lulled to sleep by the scholarly voice of Mr. Parish providing detailed histories of early NES games. And then, all of a sudden, I discovered that, if I’m startled badly enough, I’m capable of leaping four feet into the air from a laying-down position using only my ass. I learned this about myself when the soundtrack to Athena BLARED through my bedroom, seemingly fifty f*cking times louder than any of the other videos in the playlist. So I must like his work because, instead of never watching his channel ever again, I made and maintained my own NES Works playlist that’s basically the same as his, minus that Athena clip. Something HE SHOULD DO HIMSELF! By the way Jeremy, I hold grudges and I’m vindictive, and I will get my revenge. Oh yes. You’ll be nice and asleep when all of a sudden your home will be surrounded by speakers blasting Athena’s soundtrack so loud that it will liquefy your organs. I’ll wait for him to finish NES Works first, of course. I’m not going to ruin it for everyone else. I’m not a monster. Maybe now that he turned Jaws from an okay game into a pretty damn good one, I’ll just blast the soundtrack enough to get a tiny trickle of blood out of his ears.

Actually I quit maintaining the playlist and stopped listening to YouTube when I sleep. Burned too many times by volume issues. I’ll stick with Audible. BUT, I would go back to NES Works as something to fall asleep to if he pulled that Athena soundtrack from his playlist (since I’m like 60+ videos behind). Jaws: Enhanced Edition? That’s a good idea. A bad idea is inserting an obnoxiously loud (and bad) soundtrack for a terrible game into a playlist that has no other soundtracks. As far as I can tell, the only soundtrack in that playlist of 228 videos and counting is that one, and there’s no way to opt out of it. You have to make your own. It would be like if you threw on a Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary marathon and, after a couple episodes, the marathon was interrupted for twenty minutes of machine gun noises and screaming. Then again, I would never want to go to sleep listening to anything by Ken Burns. I would (and did) for Jeremy Parish. Alas.

So what’s new with the “Enhanced Edition” of Jaws? Well first I want to stress that you should set your expectations accordingly. This is not a complete tear-down and rebuild like Deadpool did with Ninja Gaiden. This is an Iron Chef effort that utilized only the available ingredients. Jeremy Parish took the original 1987 Jaws and stretched out a game that could be beaten in thirty minutes into one that has much, much meatier action. Instead of just playing until you kill Jaws, you now kill Jaws four times because the game now is divided into four segments, one for each movie (I’m kind of surprised he didn’t include a satire where Jaws wears sunglasses and smokes a stogie). Instead of just upgrading your attack power, you now have to upgrade your attack power, your speed, and your health, along with collecting other items. At the start of each segment, all your upgrades are lost and you must start over from scratch, with the only carry-over being the money you earned. And there’s a hard cap on the max money you can earn that increases with each chapter to prevent you from screw grinding on easier stages. Upgrades are no longer automatically done when you pull into the port. You can select and buy them manually and create your own strategy. It works SO good, too.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition (2026)

Don’t worry about the resetting between each level part, either. Even with that, Jaws: Enhanced Edition remains a fast-paced action game. The seashells are still the currency, but now there’s two types of them. As I noted above, you can upgrade your health. Jaws: Enhanced Edition is no longer a one-hit-death game. You can build up life, and if you take damage, enemies might drop red seashells that restore a tiny bit of health. Also, those float to the top of the playfield while the money sinks to the bottom. Hey, risk/reward factors. Very cool. Meanwhile money seashells award different values of cash depending on the type of enemy you killed for them. The system Jeremy created here is really well done, making the combat more incentivized than ever before. I was a little worried about the speed upgrade, but it never becomes so fast that it’s out of control. He did a great job. Same with the attack power, which no longer applies only to Jaws. Every enemy’s health is accounted for with your attack power. Basic enemies can start out taking so many hits that they get their own on-screen life bars now and will level-up too via palette swapping. With each new level comes new attack patterns and faster enemy speeds. While the early enemies and the ways they try to kill you will be familiar to fans of the original NES game, all creatures eventually become legitimate threats.

No more invisible random encounters. You now see the enemies on the map, Zelda II style. Eventually you’ll get an item that even shows you the primary enemy type in the combat scenario (as seen in this screenshot), including the blinking ones that fetch quests require. Later still, you’ll get an item that freezes enemies so they don’t move about (excluding Jaws, of course). I do have one complaint: you can also see and pick up health refills and money using these items. I thought that screwed-up the risk/reward factors. Especially the health refills. Why pay $1,000 at the shop when I can just sail around and find health shells just laying around? Or if I need a little more money (which was rare by that point) why would I risk the combat when I can get it on the surface? His heart was in the right place because it removes some end-of-stage grinding, but, I mean, come on! It’s Jaws. The entire game is grinding. It’s an idea that should never have made it past play-testing.

There’s brand new enemies in the game as well, which is especially impressive because I’m pretty sure there’s no new sprites in Jaws: Enhanced Edition. Or if there is, they’re so small and insignificant that they don’t really make a difference. What Jeremy did instead was take existing sprites that were previously used as items and turned them into enemies. The stars and crabs are now antagonists that provided a much bigger challenge than the rays or even the jellyfish because he managed to give them some pretty clever attack patterns. The starfish multiply like sea bunnies and the crabs spit bubbles at you that, if you get caught in one, you can’t shoot for several seconds. Perhaps too long, actually, as I found them to be so dangerous (especially in the fourth level) that I had to fight them very conservatively. The returning enemies are beefed up with new movement and attack styles as well. The rays will eventually have a curve to their trajectory, the jellyfish float up and down and even jump out of the water, and the baby sharks (and yes, Jaws as well) can turn around instead of making a full screen pass. That causes them to cluster, but it works.

In the first couple levels, you get to actually land shots on the big fella BEFORE he reaches the boat. In levels 3 and especially level 4, don’t expect it. Still, it’s such a subtle little change. All Jeremy did was move Jaws a little bit down and then have him make one pass across the screen so you actually have room to shoot him a little. But this tiny change yields so much satisfaction. I really hope he’s proud of his effort. He did very good with the tools he had.

And then there’s Jaws himself. George Lucas would be proud because he becomes faster and more intense as the game goes along. Upgrading your attack power is not enough. You have to find the special items that allow you to kill him. The game will tell you how to find these things, which usually involves slaying specific forms of basic enemies that flash (you can think of them as mini-bosses) and/or retrieving special items from a map, including the submarine in levels three and four. The bonus stages with the airplane are removed from the first three levels, and in the fourth level it’s now a special challenge that requires you to hit twenty-one jellyfish. After doing this, you can then pay extra to attack Jaws with the airplane. By the way, I never knew you could slow down or speed up the airplane in the original NES game until I started Jaws Retro Edition and found out while searching for button remapping. Huh. I was already pretty good at the bonus round too. Once I knew about the speed control, I…….. actually couldn’t hit anything anymore because it totally f*cked up my muscle memory. So thanks for that, Jaws: Retro Edition, you bastard.

“Bitch, you’re bombing me from the sky now? I can’t go up there. Not cool.” You have to pay $5,000 for 30 seconds of bombing Jaws, but by the time you get to this point, you should be out of things to upgrade and this is the only thing left that costs money. None of the fetch quests cost actual cash, which might have been a mistake since, despite all the new upgrades, it doesn’t take long to max everything out (four times over, nonetheless). At this point, you might as well just bomb the sh*t out of Jaws. The only catch is you can’t score the killing blow on Jaws from the sky, and he’ll get two bars of health back when you finish anyway. You have to be in the water when you drain those off to enter the final kill sequence.

My biggest knock against this new version of Jaws, by far, is how spongy even the basic enemies get in the third and fourth levels. Another new option added to this game is you can abandon any random encounter that doesn’t include Jaws himself and return to the boat without any penalty. In the fourth level, I had to do that several times while I built-up my attack power and speed because enemies were sucking up bullets on nearly the same level (or hell, maybe even higher) than Jaws himself did in the original game. And mind you, I had the max amount of money when I started level four and poured all of it into attack power AND bought the double shot (the only level you can buy it). Every enemy was still a complete bullet sponge even after I maxed out attack power. It wasn’t until I got the submarine and the weapons upgrades in the stage that it didn’t feel like I was trying to take down enemies with spitballs. I certainly spent a little time questioning whether Jeremy took things too far with the enemy health. The first three levels were some of the best NES gaming I ever played. The fourth level is skinny dipping in an ocean of frustration, at least at the start of it.

Since Jaws basically requires everything to be manually unlocked in each level, the fourth stage started very slowly. Autofire? You have to earn it. Being able to shoot more than one bullet at a time? Earn it. You’ll feel the difference, too.

Thankfully, in three out of the four levels, the sponginess of enemies doesn’t take that long to overcome. Money drops are generous, and despite how much stuff needs upgrading, it still goes fast. In total, I needed just about five-and-a-half hours to beat the entire four level experience of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, and all of it was spent having some degree of fun. I normally play games as short as this twice, but my hands were, no joke, legitimately aching from all the sections before I bought the autofire. Again, you have to buy it four times total. The other problems caused by sticking so closely to the original game are the lack of variety in the backgrounds and the fact that the map is unchanged from the original game and it’s not a very good map. How you use the map is different. In levels one and two, you ONLY use the left starting port and can return to it as many times as you want without having to travel across the map and back. The right port does nothing. There’s no penalty for grinding near the shoreline. Hell, the game encourages it. In level three, you ONLY use the right port with the left port now doing nothing.

One jarring aspect is that it uses the same static screen for every item or major event. This one, which still looks like a fishing pole being rammed up Jaws’ ass, complete with look of shock.

Only the fourth level has you going to both ports, with different upgrades and fetch quests at each one. Even then, there’s nothing to prevent you from grinding. The rule that requires you to travel back and forth between each port is gone entirely. Eventually you’ll get options that allow you to press buttons to see where the enemy encounters are. Really, I don’t have any major complaints. I guess I wish whatever was the current “mission” was displayed. Like if all I had left to do to get a key item was encounter Jaws X amount of times, I wish it had said so on the main screen. You might also have to talk to one of the options in the port multiple times when you’ve already met the conditions to unlock whatever it does. It’s a little janky, but in an authentic 1987 NES kind of way.

See the little crosshairs? Boy, do they help. The act of defeating Jaws after you whittle down its health has gone from a confusing, sloppy mess to perhaps too easy. I went four-for-four in defeating Jaws in one shot. I never screwed it up even once. I suspect Jeremy wasn’t a fan of this sequence at all and would ditched it for something else altogether if that had been an option.

The most important part is I never got bored. Frustrated? Oh yeah, especially in the fourth level. But never to the point that I wanted to stop. Simply put, Jeremy Parish has taken a game that was a cynical cash grab developed in roughly a month that lucked into being halfway decent and expanded it into a game that feels like a much more fully thought-out experience. It sure as hell no longer feels like an up-jumped Atari game. Even on its own merits, Jaws: Enhanced Edition is a very good action game. Not a great one. Sticking like glue to the established sprites was admirable, I guess. But the original Jaws is the way it is because they took only a month to make it. A month. While I get what Jeremy was trying to prove here, there’s nothing inherently sacred with the original game’s sprites or roster of enemies. For all we know if they had two months instead of one, maybe someone on the development team would have said “hey, let’s put squids and octopi in this.” Jeremy, YOU ARE THAT MONTH! I mean.. you know what I’m saying. The bigger variety of enemies and tiers to those enemies is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll still leave you wanting a little bit more. Still, taking a middle of the road game and pushing it to the brink of greatness puts it in the pantheon of ROM hacks, at least in my view.

Finding items and the presentation of finding them does lack a little in pizazz.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition feels like the type of ROM hack that a talented coder takes on as a personal challenge to themselves and not necessarily something that got a big, splashy rollout with full digital distribution on major platforms like Jaws Retro Edition got. That’s not a weakness, though. That’s its greatest strength. Usually the only “enhanced edition” style retro releases are reserved for big, successful games. The type of games already famous for being good or great, or at the minimum, historically important games. Jaws is a game that, whether it deserves the reputation or not (it doesn’t), it’s mostly remembered as a joke. It doesn’t surprise me that someone took what was, at best, a decent but very limited 80s action game and turned it into something much more substantive and enjoyable. I’ve seen it done before with games good and bad. I’ve reviewed quite a few (they’re under the “new games on old platforms” section of my retro index) and I plan on continuing to review them, even if only 0.1% of my readers will ever play them.

One of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing Super Pitfall! 30th Anniversary Edition by NES Rocks, which is one of those “personal challenge” games that is famous for turning one of the worst video games ever made into a competent and even fun one. Hey Limited Run Games: I’m pretty sure NES Rocks is available for hire. And if you ever do Goonies 1 & 2, use NES Rocks’ quality of life update for Goonies II. It’s really good.

Games like Jaws: Enhanced Edition DO NOT get wide releases. Except this one did, and nothing would make me happier than if mainstream gamers said “we like this! More please!” and publishers actually listened. They have these huge catalogs of ne’er-do-well releases that passionate fans have turned into borderline masterpieces. Jaws: Enhanced Edition isn’t as exceptional as it would appear. This is what you get when you let fans show how much they love catalog games, and you have to love a game to make it this good. Sucks for Jeremy though because if his effort had failed I would have given this a NO! and considered that revenge enough for waking me from my slumber. Alas, he can sleep tight knowing that, someday, he’ll look out his window and his house will be surrounded with skyscrapers. Then seconds later, he’ll realize those aren’t skyscrapers. They’re actually speakers, and he’ll know the debt is about to be settled.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under New Games for Retro Platforms, Nintendo Switch Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with Jaws, Jaws Enhanced Edition, Jaws Enhanced Edition Review, Jaws Limited Run Games, Jaws NES, Jaws NES remake, Jaws PS5, Jaws Retro Edition, Jaws Retro Edition PlayStation Review, Jaws Retro Edition Review, Jaws Retro Edition Switch Review, Jaws Review, Jaws ROM Hack, Jaws Steam, Jaws Switch, Jaws video games, New Jaws Game

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K. C.’s Krazy Chase! aka Crazy Chase (EU) Come-Come (South America) Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2 Released September, 1982 Designed by Ed Averett Developed by Magnavox Included KC Returns (Windows, Delisted?) Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

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K. C. Munchkin! aka Munchkin (EU) Come-Come II (South America) Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2 Released in 1981 Designed by Ed Averett Developed by Magnavox NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

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Nuts & Milk Platform: Famicom Released July 20, 1984 Designed by Kikuta Masaaki Developed by Hudson Soft Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE

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Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released June 24, 2002 Directed by Denis Dyack Developed by Silicon Knights Published by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released January 14, 1987 (JPN) December 1, 1988* (US) Directed by Tadashi Sugiyama & Yasuhisa Yamamura Developed by Nintendo Available with a Switch Online Subscription

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Total Recall Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released August, 1990 Developed by Interplay Published by Acclaim NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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K. C.’s Krazy Chase!
aka Crazy Chase (EU) Come-Come (South America)
Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2
Released September, 1982
Designed by Ed Averett
Developed by Magnavox
Included KC Returns (Windows, Delisted?)
Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

K. C. Munchkin!
aka Munchkin (EU) Come-Come II (South America)
Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2
Released in 1981
Designed by Ed Averett
Developed by Magnavox
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

Nuts & Milk
Platform: Famicom
Released July 20, 1984
Designed by Kikuta Masaaki
Developed by Hudson Soft
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE

Donkey Kong 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August 25, 2016
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Original Concept & Graphics by elbobelo
Designed by Googie
Link to patch at ROMHacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released April 20, 2025
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Designed by Aether Knight
Link to patch at ROMhacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released June 24, 2002
Directed by Denis Dyack
Developed by Silicon Knights
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Super Princess Peach
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released October 20, 2005 (JPN) February 27, 2006 (US)
Concept by Takayuki Ikeda
Directed by Akio Imai and Azusa Tajima
Developed by Tose
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Mario Wiki

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January 14, 1987 (JPN) December 1, 1988* (US)
Directed by Tadashi Sugiyama & Yasuhisa Yamamura
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Subscription

Zelda 2: Redux
Released December 14, 2021 and updated July 25, 2023
Unauthorized Quality of Life ROM hack of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Remaster designed by ShadowOne333
Link to Patch at ROMHacking.Net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Total Recall
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August, 1990
Developed by Interplay
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED