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

March 2, 2026 by 1 Comment

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 lions) 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.

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Total Recall (NES Review)

February 26, 2026 by 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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What I’m Playing – February 2026

February 23, 2026 by 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 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)
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 and not the cynical cash grab. 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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Eggerland (Famicom Disk System) aka Meikyuu Shinwa – Eggerland Mystery 2 (MSX) Review

February 12, 2026 by 4 Comments

Eggerland
aka Meikyuu Shinwa (MSX JPN)
aka Eggerland Mystery 2 (MSX EU)
Platforms: Famicom Disk System, MSX
Released in 1986 (MSX) January 29, 1987 (FDS)
Developed by HAL Laboratory, Inc.
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

For this review, I only played the Famicom Disk System version for the smoother animation and more responsive controls. Both games feature identical maps though.

Eggerland (Famicom Disk System)
Eggerland Mystery 2 (MSX)

Since I literally just finished Eggerland Mystery for the MSX, I was going to wait a while to do the next review in the Lolo series. Curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see if the sequel improved the skippy, unresponsive controls. Spoiler: they did not, at least on the MSX. Movement is still skippy or jerky and that makes movement feel slow and unresponsive. So I was fine postponing the rest of the reviews.. until I saw that there were two exits in the first level. Hold on, what? That’s when I found out that the sequel is a gigantic 10 x 10, one-hundred room interconnected maze where sometimes it’s not physically possible to solve a level unless you entered from a specific door coming from another direction. Now THAT’S enticing!

The ultimate goal is to find five total keys and the four “gods” pictured below, each of who will give you a special power in the Devil’s levels.

And it gets even better! The exact same game, with the same level design across the board, was ported the next year to the Famicom Disk System. This means I could ditch the MSX build and play the game with significant quality of life improvements like smooth animation that allows for responsive controls. So I started playing the game simply titled Eggerland on FDS and realized the levels were significantly tougher than the previous game, so screw it, I decided to continue with the Lolo marathon. I was so excited, but it didn’t take long before some jaw-dropping glitches and stunningly ill-thought design choices turned what should have been a slam-dunk of a YES! verdict into one of the closest decisions I’ve ever made at IGC. I suppose it’s fitting for a game literally starring a blue ball.

In the US versions of Lolo, I would be a single frame away from death here via the Don Medusa on the left of me. In this game? Not so much. Though this technique could in theory make this a hidden gem for the speed running community.

The worst example of how sloppy Eggerland is would be the don medusas. See that little devil thing to the left of me in the above picture? That’s one of them, and it’s an Adventures of Lolo mainstay that made its debut in this title. It’s functionally a medusa that either walks up and down or side to side as far as it can go before changing directions, and if you’re lined-up with it and there’s nothing blocking its view of you (trees don’t count), you’re supposed to die instantly. In the next frame, we’ll cross paths and I will, in fact, not die. As long as you keep moving in the opposite direction it’s walking, you will survive every single time. Here’s what it looks like, and in this clip, I needed a couple attempts to clear it because it’s a tight space AND I had to make a turn, but I did do it even with the turn.

There’s two catches: the don medusa must be able to walk, so you can’t pin it with blocks to the point where it’s immobile. However, even a half-space will be enough that you can use the walk-past trick. The other catch is that it only works if you’re moving the opposite direction of it, so trying to walk around it isn’t possible. It will kill you if you, say, try to move over the top of one moving up and down. In the first Lolo game I played, the US version of Adventures of Lolo 1 (up next at IGC), you absolutely CANNOT do this. I even started replaying Lolo 1 right after finishing this to verify that I somehow never discovered this my previous time playing it.

(Adventures of Lolo – NES – US Version) Nope.

At first, I thought I’d found an insane glitch that made cheesing the levels based around don medusae (I assume that’s the actual plural of don medusa) absurdly easy. Like in that clip I used, that is CLEARLY not the way the level was meant to be beaten. Because I love the puzzle design of Lolo, at first I decided not to use it. I even undid what happened in that clip and beat the stage the proper way (you’ll note that I had an arrow that I didn’t need to use). Except late in the game, there were levels that sure seemed like there was no way to solve them BUT this “exploit.” At least I think so. Maybe I just lacked the imagination to solve them correctly.  (shrug)

The Rockys, which are these annoying stone blocks that are only there to pin you in and force you to start over by pressing SELECT, made their debut in this game as well. There’s also a lot of arrow-based levels which kept confusing my father. “Dad, I keep telling you: the arrows only affect you if you try moving in the opposite direction they’re pointed. You can enter and exit them from any other angle.” He got it eventually.

If this mechanic wasn’t deliberate, and because of how these same enemies work in future games I assume it wasn’t, it’s one of those things where it’s on the developers to do a better job of programming it so that you can’t just walk past a thing that’s meant to kill you as soon as you share an unobstructed line of sight. The problem with that don medusa trick is that it makes some of the levels downright trivial, and what I’m looking for is tight puzzle design. While there’s some of that in the FDS version of Eggerland, I was also able to outrun the skulls with ease and/or cheese the dragons like before. Thankfully Eggerland is the last game in the franchise where out-running skulls or dragon fire will be easy, so clearly they learned their lesson. Then there’s situations like the mystery objects, like seen in the picture below.

In this room, the snake is the mystery object.

For most of the levels, the mystery box is empty. But every once in a while, the ? will show an enemy or object, and you have to do something unusual related to that object to trigger the effect. For this room, I had to cover up the snake completely with boxes, like I just did. When that happens, the screen flashes violently (seriously, it’s a huge seizure risk every single time) and then some item or effect appears on the screen. In the case of this level, it’s a shadow Lolo that, once you touch it, allows you to walk freely around the screen, even walking through solid surfaces and walls. You can’t collect the hearts so you need to find a place to stop and press the button, at which point Lolo will teleport there and you can finish the room. Other stages might have separate tricks like turning water into sand or turning every character into an egg for a few seconds.

Shadow
Green Lolo

In theory, it’s a neat idea. In practice, I beat several levels that had the mystery item without ever using the item. I also beat levels where it gave me an arrow, a hammer, or a bridge where I never needed to use them. This even happened near the end of the game, like in the level in the pictures below this. The level has a pen made out of grass that contains three leapers. Grass makes its debut in Eggerland and it’s important to future games because enemies cannot walk on the grass.

Looks complicated, right?

The leapers are also important. They’re fast-moving enemies which fall permanently into a coma upon contact and functionally become a wall. Once they’re asleep, they can’t even be shot and turned into an egg. They’re there, forever, and if you block yourself in, you have to reach for the cyanide capsule. If you stop them in the right place, they turn into blocks and help you beat levels. They’re yet another important staple of the Lolo franchise debuting in Eggerland 2. In the room shown below, you get shots that you can use to turn them into eggs and push them out of the pen, then wait for them to run to the area in front of a monster and put them to sleep, acting as a block. I mean that seems to be what the designers had in mind, but I solved the puzzle without cheating not needing any of that sh*t.

This is beaten, and I’m guessing not in the way the developers intended.

So the puzzle design is REALLY loose with many stages that look complicated on the surface being uncomplicated by having multiple outs. That tracks with the difficulty scaling in general, which is HORRIBLE. The majority of the toughest puzzles I thought were in the middle of the game, with maybe one or two right before I reached King Egger’s levels being head scratchers. Despite being one gigantic maze, there’s only a couple paths you can take and you’ll inevitably hit a dead end and reach a room where the path you took doesn’t allow it to be solved, requiring you to go backwards and take an alternative route.Thankfully there is a built-in map, and I also used a really handy map that I found at GameFAQs.

In this stage, I for sure screwed up and didn’t beat it the way it was meant to be beaten. I was supposed to block all those skulls from moving around. At least I think so, but the enemy behavior is so dumb in general that I just had to wait a few seconds for a clearing. I was easily able to run past ALL those skulls and get the key because they don’t move fast enough and they don’t heat seek you. I didn’t even need to use rewind. In the first US Lolo game, the skulls move much faster and always take the most efficient route to get you, and I’m guessing the future games will also do this, making this the last Lolo game with numbskulls for skulls.

But it means the game is secretly a lot more limiting and linear than it appears on the surface, which should mean that they could still order the levels somewhat by difficulty. Instead, the curve is kind of all over the place. I’m going to guess this was the last Eggerland/Lolo game where they didn’t have any really good playtesters, nor did anyone designing this know the difference between medium and hard puzzles. It’s kind of obvious since the difficulty craters completely once you clear the main maze and enter the Devil’s levels, most of which are literally like level 1 or 2 or even tutorial stages in American Lolo games. Why would they do that? Presumably people would buy games like these for the brain teasers, right? So having them ordered by difficulty as accurately as possible is kind of important. I only really got stuck twice, and that was because of some insanely abstract logic. Here’s one of the times I got stuck:

The mystery “item” is the leaper enemy. In order to trigger its mystery power, you have to put it to sleep, then step back and touch it again, then step back and touch it again, then step back and touch it again, and finally you have to (checks notes) step back and touch it again. At this point the screen will flash with a seizure-inducing strobe and the “walk through everything” item will appear. I figured out every mystery thing on my own, and usually very quickly. Besides this room, only one of them took me more than five minutes to figure out. The problem is, even though the game tells you that the leaper is the clue to the mystery, there’s no way to logic-out that you need to kiss the damn thing four times to trigger the mystery item. It’s not anything you would do through natural gameplay flow or experimentation. How anyone ever figured it out is beyond me. There’s no “DING” noise when you touch it the first time it’s asleep to clue you in that you’re on the right track. I admit, I had to look up the solution to this one, a first for me in the entire Lolo franchise. None of the other mystery items are anywhere near that abstract.

And speaking of “what were they thinking?!”

In addition to abstract, arbitrary design, Eggerland has a TON of downtime that combines with brainless trial-and-error design related to a large section of water-based levels. At a few points, you get a raft out of a treasure chest and exit a level through a river instead of a door. The problem is that it’s SO SLOW and you have to wait forever for it to get to the next room. Now, the slowness is partially based on the puzzle solving, as one of the challenges of those rooms is figuring out where to get off the raft. As soon as you step off the raft, it’s gone, so if you step off on the wrong spot, you’re dead. I did this many times and, had I not been using an emulator, I would have to go through that insanely slow process over and over. It can literally take over a minute of just waiting. But it gets worse.

Sigh.

Once you finish one of the water levels, you then have to select the right space to reenter the water to drift to the next room, and there are NO hints which space is the correct space and no way to logic it out. If you pick the wrong one, you have to collect the raft again. Except, sometimes it doesn’t instantly fail, but instead circles around the level before just stopping and letting you drown, costing you a life. It’s blind, no logic trial and error that is so slow, so tedious, and so pointless that it would have made giving Eggerland a NO! a no-brainer if I hadn’t been able to fast forward and use save states. How the hell did the same people who created so many clever puzzles not realize how f*cking boring this could get? Hell, it was boring and felt like busy work based around blindly poking every spot next to water AND I WAS USING FAST FORWARD! What were they thinking? This is bad, bad game design.

There’s ten total tunnels tantalizingly tucked away in Eggerland. I just wish they actually cared enough to add a degree of logic to them.

Besides just solving rooms, the main object of Eggerland is to locate five keys that will allow you to enter the levels belonging to the Devil (aka King Egger) along with four special helper gods that will give you superpowers required to beat the devil’s rooms. Ten of the one hundred rooms have a hidden tunnel within them, like seen above. Well, not all are HIDDEN-hidden. Some appear immediately when you solve the puzzle in the correct room. Others remain hidden until you solve the puzzle AND THEN shove an arbitrary block. Again, there’s no clues to this or any way to logic-out which rooms are the correct rooms. If there were items that could be found, like compasses or maps or things that mark the map you have with an X, that would be one thing. Apparently Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu does have such items, which makes me think they realized how bad Eggerland was for not having them. The sequel also apparently ditches these:

Sand Trap
Sand Trap
Sand Trap

Four of the tunnels contain “the gods” while five of the tunnels contain keys, and then there’s one tunnel that’s the portal to the final sequence of puzzles (either I’m very lucky or the game successfully queues you in a way where the 100th room you enter will be the one with the final tunnel). In order to collect the keys and gods, you have to complete a challenge that requires you to reach a treasure chest in the allotted time while having to run through sand, which slows you down. These “sand traps” (seen in the above gallery) have multiple different potential pathways, but only one will allow you to barely reach the treasure chest before time runs out. If it does, you’ll have to wait for a loading screen (this is the Famicom Disk System, remember) and then reenter the tunnel, which goes to another loading screen, then try again. “Nuts to that! I’ll just use save states” I said, a decision that would bite me in the ass here:

(glares with contempt)

The path in this level was obvious: go through the UP arrow and to the left and the second UP arrow, then walk around the left side and down to the treasure chest. Except, I kept failing just short of the chest. Actually, I was literally on top of the chest and usually taking my final step before being completely on the treasure space when time would run out. I’d reload the save state and try again. And again, and again. I’d keep coming up short. So I switched to my keyboard and used the directional keys and had one of the kids with their youthful reaction time help me create a frame-perfect run, cussing a blue streak about how prickish the design of this level was the whole time. And then, to my absolute horror, I discovered that even a frame-perfect run would fail every single time:

A frame-perfect attempt would die on this spot every single time.

“Oh sh*t, something has gone wrong.” At this point, the don medusa trick felt like a red flag that nobody properly tested Eggerland. I was worried that they somehow let a level that was impossible to beat slip by detection. Except, I found a complete play-through video on YouTube and, when the person did the same room, they got it on their first try. “What the hell is going on?” I thought, and then my father noticed the timer in the video changed from 9 seconds to 8 seconds a lot later than ours did while in the game we were playing, the 9 changed to 8 almost immediately. We figured it might be connected to our emulator and tinkered with a variety of latency settings, but it didn’t matter. The best possible run kept ending where you see in the above picture: a single frame short of the goal. I really thought it was game over. Finally, Dad said “instead of reloading the save state, leave the room and come back.” Except, I’d already done that and nothing changed. But, when I did it on my third time entering the room, I won on my first try. Then I rewound it and won on my next try, and then I rewound so I could record a clip and did it a third time in one attempt.

So what the hell happened? My father’s theory is that the game has an invisible one-second timer that is always going, and when I entered the tunnel for the first and second attempts, I had done so while that invisible timer was just short of being empty instead of having just reloaded. Since I was reloading the same save state.. for literally a couple hours.. it kept going back to the impossible-to-finish “9 seconds” that was closer to 8. So, my bad for using save states for the convenience, but the fact that it’s even possible to do this is maddening and it means, in theory, a person who played this in 1988 could have chosen the correct path and made all the correct moves and still have lost without ever knowing why based on having the bad luck to enter the tunnels at the wrong moment. That’s inexcusable in any situation, but for a puzzle game it would be especially infuriating because it could send a player on a wild goose chase for an alternative solution when they had the right one all along. I was already annoyed because these levels don’t really fit with Lolo at all, but this straight-up pissed me off, and the game never recovered.

And then there’s the finale.

That is the first room of the final tunnel, and if you haven’t collected all five keys, the tunnel to the right of the giant “5” (which I suppose is the REAL final tunnel) won’t be there, so you have to leave and go find them. If I hadn’t used the map from GameFAQs and seen the tunnels in each level, I wouldn’t have known about some of their existences and never would have thought that I had to arbitrarily shove a block to reveal them. That would have meant backtracking through one-hundred goddamned levels in search of them. When I entered the KEY 5 room, I originally thought the tunnel to the right of the giant 5 was the exit back to the room I was just in, so I beat the first stage, which was this one:

Literally every one of those hearts gives you two shots. This requires no effort to “solve.”

And all that did was warp me to a different spot on the map. Calling the four puzzles attached to the KEY 5 room “puzzles” is a stretch since there’s no effort to make them difficult. The above room feels like a bonus level where you can let off steam by gunning down the snakes with dozens of shots. It was an ominous sign that the designers had long since run out of f*cks to give. Since it’s literally impossible to have reached the room with the KEY 5 puzzle until the very, very end of the game, you’ll have solved some damn challenging puzzles by this point. Thankfully, I already had all five keys and Gods, which meant I could go through the devil’s rooms. There’s eight of them, and they took me, oh, about five minutes to solve. They introduce new gameplay ideas, like in this room:

That’s not an emulator trick. You just suddenly move super fast for this one and only room. You don’t even do anything to activate it. It just happens. Other rooms do require you to actually press a button to do things you haven’t been able to do before, like remove a tree instead of a rock, like in this room:

At least you can logic out that there’s some trick to this level based on the normally impossible layout. But besides that one thing, look how basic the layout is. It’s practically a tutorial layout. The difficulty curve in Eggerland is so bad that the entire end game honestly feels like the developers got bored and wanted to just get it over with.

It seems neat, except these levels are too damn easy. This is the final sequence of a game that has some damn tough puzzle design at times. Ending THIS GAME on levels that require almost no brain power (which seven of the eight don’t, and the one exception is like a level 3 or 4 puzzle in another Lolo game) was a huge letdown. The only way it could possibly get worse is that the final boss is a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors where you have to watch Lolo and King Egger dance back and forth for twenty agonizing seconds before shooting AND it’s best of seven AND it’s f*cking rigged, regardless of what you select, to have Lolo score, then King Egger, then two to Lolo, then two to King Egger, then the final one is won by Lolo, but despite being rigged, you can still have ties that last quite a while. Well, guess what?

F*ck you, Eggerland, and f*ck you too Alex Kidd for giving them this idea in the first place.

My criteria for a YES! is that I spent at least 50.1% of my time with a game having fun. If I hadn’t been using an emulator, this would have been one of the easiest NO! verdicts just by the sheer amount of downtime that’s multiplied by blind luck trial and error. Those areas were a frustrating slog even with fast forward. The “did I have more fun than not?” question is a little harder with emulation trickery and the map I had from GameFAQs. As angry as I am by the haphazard design that offers no logic or means to suss out pathways or hidden elements without blind luck (or a guide), I have to admit that some of the levels were very good. But, the more that I thought about it, the more I realized the truly good levels were outnumbered by ones that weren’t very creative or challenging.

I can’t stress enough that there’s some damn good puzzles in here. Plus, unlike Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu, none of the levels in this game will be copied and pasted to future US games in the Lolo franchise. For the US version of Adventures of Lolo, 15 of its 50 stages are direct copies of Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu levels. For The Adventures of Lolo 2 US, it’s 25 of the 55 levels. There’s also a stand alone 50 level game for Famicom Disk System called Eggerland Souzouhe no Tabidachi that uses the American Lolo 1 engine. 34 of its 50 stages were used in Adventures of Lolo in the US, and Lolo 2 US used 13 of its levels. Finally, 6 of Lolo 1 US’s puzzles come from the original MSX Eggerland Mystery game, while Lolo 2 are in both Eggerland Mystery and Souzouhe no Tabidachi. Eggerland for FDS is 100 one-off levels. So there’s a legitimate reason for huge fans of Lolo to be interested in Eggerland FDS/Eggerland Mystery 2. I’m never going to review Eggerland Souzouhe no Tabidachi, but I’ll talk about it more in my next review, which will be for the US version of Adventures of Lolo 1. By the way, I got these figures on how many rooms carried over from game to game from maps created by Benoît Delvaux, and I can’t thank him enough. I had intended to manually count them up myself. THANK YOU, Mr. Delvaux. Check out his Lolo maps right here.

Once I factor in the downtime, the sand traps (and I’m not even counting being stuck on that level for a few hours because of an issue with the timer), the don medusa thing, and the horrible final sequence ending on a fake version of RPS, I realized I spent more time mad, frustrated, or just plain bored than I did enjoying the type of Lolo gameplay that I signed up for. So no, I can’t recommend Eggerland for Famicom Disk System and Eggerland Mystery 2 for MSX. It’s a very, very close NO! In fact, it’s so close that it’s one of those “fans of the American series should probably check it out anyway” decisions. Though I think such fans will probably be as annoyed as I was and, more often than not, get bored. Eggerland has it’s moments, but it’s an overall boring game.

Well thank goodness. I was worried their kids would be born out of wedlock. Also, does that look like Blaster Master’s ground or is it just me?

Eggerland is a better concept than it is an actual game, but final execution just isn’t good enough. Apparently the direct sequel, Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu for the Famicom, addresses some of my complaints with items that alert you that you’re in a room with a tunnel, and the sand traps are gone. So, like the first Eggerland Mystery, this Eggerland was still a glorified proof of concept for better things to come. And hey, if the sequel sucks, at least I know I have plenty of linear Lolo games coming that do a better job. HOPEFULLY this was the only game in the franchise that’s a rotten egg.
Verdict: NO!

By the way, the producer of these games? None other than Satoru Iwata, the President and CEO of Nintendo who died on my 26th birthday. It’s so strange that Lolo is a series that’s considered a definitive NES franchise and yet Lolo gets almost no respect from the modern Nintendo. The company that made this would go on to create Kirby and the Smash Bros. franchise. Come on! Where’s the Lolo love?

 

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Eggerland Mystery (MSX Review) The First Game in the Adventures of Lolo Franchise

February 7, 2026 by 1 Comment

Eggerland Mystery
Platform: MSX
Released in 1985
Developed by HAL Laboratory, Inc.
NO MODERN RELEASE

Yeah, the puzzle design in this one can be quite weird.

Eggerland Mystery is the very first game in the franchise that would come to be known as The Adventures of Lolo outside of Japan. America only got three of those games, but there’s a LOT more Lolo releases that Americans never got. That obviously includes the first two games since MSX never got a US release, but there’s also Famicom-exclusives and even a Game Boy version of Lolo. So it’s a pretty big series, actually, and before Eggerland Mystery, I’d only played one of them all the way through: the original US version of Adventures of Lolo. It was actually the first NES game I reviewed for IGC all the way back in my first year (I also started playing Lolo 2 but I’m pretty sure I never finished it). Eggerland/Lolo is one of those confusing franchises where the version America got is completely different from the Japanese original. NES Lolo 2 in the West is Lolo 1 in the East, and the puzzles in Japanese Lolo 1 are different from those in American Lolo 2. On the left is level 1-1 of The Adventures of Lolo 2 in the US, and on the right is Adventures of Lolo 1 in Japan’s level 1-1.

Adventures of Lolo 2 (US)
Adventures of Lolo (JPN)

So that’s awesomely annoying. I’ll do my best to walk everyone through this when I get to later games in the series. The first US NES Adventures of Lolo is on Switch Online right now, and it’s worth a look. They’re a series of logic-puzzlers with a slight action tilt to them, but the focus is mostly on flexing your gray matter. Well, at least that’s where the series will eventually end up. It became kind of obvious with this first release that HAL wanted to make something a little more arcade-like and hadn’t realized their bread and butter would be in tight, one-solution style puzzles. Eggerland Mystery comes close at times to being equal parts action and puzzle, and the result is a game with an identity crisis. Luckily, that crisis would be resolved in the next game in the franchise. I’ll get to the sequel soon, but today, let’s look at the first game.

One original aspect of this that wasn’t used in future games: sometimes (very, very rarely) the final door is hidden and must be found.

With a whopping 100 puzzle rooms (plus 20 bonus round rooms) and 5 post-game stages that require a special password to unlock, Eggerland Mystery is a pretty dang big game. If you played any of the NES or Famicom versions of Lolo, you mostly know what to expect. Instead of collecting hearts, you collect diamonds. There’s no treasure chest to reach, either. That’s replaced with a door that opens after you’ve collected every diamond. The object is simply to collect all the diamonds and then walk through the door. There’s a handful of enemies, some of which are harmless, while others, like medusa, prevent you from crossing their path unless you place a block in their line of sight.

The arrows seen in this screen can be walked through from the side, but never in the opposite way they’re pointed. Also, you don’t know which diamonds give you shots until you get them, but they always give you two shots when they do.

The medusas can’t be killed (except in the bonus stages, which are stupid), but with other enemies, some of the diamonds provide you with shots that temporarily turn them into eggs. Once they’re eggs, another shot blows them off the screen (they will respawn soon) OR you can push them, using them functionally as blocks to help solve the puzzles. They can even be pushed in the water and used as rafts. Finally, some levels might also provide you with special tools like bridges to cross water or the ability to change the direction of a one-way arrow. So far, so Lolo. But, this for sure isn’t the NES Lolo in many, many ways.

Between bonus stages, you’re provided with a password if you need to quit, but you’re also provided with one single character for the ultimate password that takes you to the final five stages of the game. Beating those five stages doesn’t get you a better ending or anything like that (hell, there’s no ending at all) but the toughest level in the game was among those five puzzles, so that’s something. Here is that password, with the heart being the final thing you enter.

For starters, your movement is quite janky. I’d describe the animation in this game as “choppy” which causes the controls to sometimes seem laggy or unresponsive. You’ll especially feel it when you have to ride eggs that you’ve pushed in the water or dodge the armadillo-like enemies that roll at you, who are by far the hardest aspect of the game. It’s certainly not the puzzles themselves. It’s clear that the designers didn’t fully grasp the concept of tight puzzle design at this point, because I was able to finish tons of levels with leftover shots. I was also often able to circumvent the “puzzle logic” by ignoring threats, specifically the skulls. In future Eggerland/Lolo games, the skulls will move faster and provide a legitimate threat that needs to be addressed before grabbing the final diamond/heart in the room, which wakes them up. In Eggerland Mystery, you move faster than them, and sometimes you can even grab the final diamond when it’s directly next to a skull and, as long as you start moving right away, avoid being killed by it when it wakes up. I did this in multiple rooms.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s levels where you’re meant to leg-it past the skulls, like in this stage. In other stages, you’re meant to “tempt them” to chase you in one direction and then you simply run around to the other side once they’re committed to the path they’re on. You’re much faster than them, so as long as you don’t panic, you’ll win every foot race. It helps the skulls aren’t very smart and don’t necessarily heat-seek you. In future games, you mostly can’t ignore them.

The dragons have a similar problem. Although they’re much harder to cheese, sometimes you can trick them by taking a half-step forward and letting them fire at you, then back up and run past them once their fire passes you. This requires a lot of room though, and now I’m curious if this is possible to do in future Lolo games. Either way, a lot of the puzzles have “multiple outs” and, for games like this, I prefer a much tighter design. Fans of the NES games will also notice that many enemies and elements common to Lolo hadn’t been invented yet with this game. The “leapers” that fall asleep when you touch them? They’re not here, nor are the walking versions of the medusas that throw swords at you, the rock monsters that push you around, sand traps, or any stages involving lava or collapsing bridges. In 105 levels, I only got stuck one time, and that’s when I realized that the game had introduced the teleporting snakes idea where you must kill one of the harmless snakes, then push a block over where it was, and it’ll respawn somewhere else.

In this gallery, you can see me start with a snake above the river, but after it sinks in the lake, because I covered the space it started, it reappears south of the river. By the way, the currents aren’t visible, so you won’t know how a raft behaves until you try it.

It took me nearly an hour to figure that out. Mind you, you’re two-thirds of the way through the game before this is even needed, with no education that this is even going to be a thing that you need to do. It’s pretty obvious that HAL had no idea what they were doing and were flying by the seam of their pants with Eggerland Mystery, but the franchise would drastically improve from here. For the first game, they didn’t quite grasp that they were a home puzzle game and not a coin-op. You’ll notice there’s a score in the corner, though that’s related to collecting diamonds and how many enemies you kill. There’s no penalty for taking too many steps like some Sokoban games (aka Boxxle) might do, nor is there a bonus for saving shots. At least I don’t think there’s a bonus, but there are bonus stages which were quite lame and a constant reminder of how janky the game’s “combat” mechanics are. The shooting is not very well programmed, as not every shot that’s a direct hit actually works to turn an enemy into an egg. I had a TON of moments where a shot landed and nothing happened. It’s all but a guarantee it’ll happen to you multiple times in some of the later bonus stages and even during a few of the puzzles.

In the bonus stages, you can’t die and enemies that normally shoot you, like the medusa, no longer do. You have 20 seconds to blow away every enemy on the screen for bonus points. This was a huge waste of time.

If you play in the B Mode of the game, you play the same 100 levels, only this time you have a time limit and each stage has bonus point items. While that sounds enticing, the items are seemingly hidden in arbitrary spots, and possibly randomly generated. There’s no “puzzle” element to the scoring system. I stuck to the A mode and was more than happy. For all its jank, the formula created by Eggerland lasted through over ten games for a reason. I’m just getting restarted with Lolo after playing the first game in the franchise back in 2012. Over the next year or two, I intend to review all the other console and MSX games in the series. When I do, the thing I’m hoping to see improved the most isn’t actually the play control, but the difficulty scaling. There were so many times late in the game where I found myself saying “that should have been a very early puzzle.” So there’s a LOT of room for improvement, but the good news is, the franchise will keep getting better. In fact, it gets so good that it makes Eggerland Mystery feel like an unfinished proof of concept.

I’m pretty sure this is the only game in the Lolo franchise where one of the special power items allows you to generate a new block any place you want and then push around. In future games, this would be replaced with a hammer that allows you to shatter a single rock anywhere you want. Sadly, the “magic framer” item only appears a couple of times in the entire 100+ level game.

The reason this isn’t the first game in a Definitive Review is because I’m taking my time with these games. I think I would have gotten bored if I played through Eggerland Mystery’s 100+ puzzles (and the unbearable bonus levels) in a single sitting. Instead, I paced myself over the course of a week and took frequent breaks. Games like this are ideal for that, and Lolo specifically excels when you hit-up a handful of levels at a time. That’s why I really think Nintendo and HAL need to figure things out and put out a collection. It’s just such a perfect franchise for a portable platform like Nintendo Switch. Well, I do sort of question how portable the humongous Switch 2 really is. I don’t take it places like I did the original, BUT MY POINT STANDS!

If you’re saying “hey wait, didn’t I see that thing in Kirby?” Yes. Yes, you did. Lolo and Princess Lala (pronounced Low-Low and Lah-Lah) are actually recurring villains in the Kirby franchise, only they’re now called “Lololo & Lalala.” No clue why. If HAL wanted to resurrect the gameplay style of the franchise, I have no objection to dropping Lolo in favor of Kirby. The gameplay is what’s timeless and Lolo’s character design is as generic as it gets, and I say that as a woman who uses a generic round, yellow character as a mascot. Along with StarTropics, this seems like the biggest HAL/Nintendo franchise to get NO reference at all in Smash Bros. I absolutely do not understand how this series, so beloved across the world and a game that sold enough to get TEN games has no clout in the 21st century.

I’m going to guess that when I finish the series, I’m going to ultimately name Eggerland Mystery the worst in the franchise. It’s clunky, often forgets what kind of game it is, and the level design isn’t particularly strong. It’s not necessarily weak, either, but it’s so loose compared to the US versions of Lolo that I can’t even guarantee Lolo fans will like Eggerland Mystery. The movement is too sluggish and the puzzles aren’t as tight or clever as the series would get, to the point that I think Lolo fans are likely to be at least a little disappointed. But if you want to see where one of gaming’s most underrated franchises got its start, I still think it’s worth a look. Just lower your expectations if you’re familiar with the series, because this thing is SLOPPY. But it’s fun too, and another reason why gaming fans owe the MSX more than they realize.
Verdict: YES!

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Super Metroid (SNES Review)

February 4, 2026 by 3 Comments

Super Metroid
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Released March 19, 1994
Directed by Yoshio Sakamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Included with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) 

I don’t know if I would go so far as to call this one of the great opening sequences, but I’ll say that Super Metroid is pretty dang good at seamlessly incorporating cinematic sequences into the live gameplay. The finale does this even better.

Back in 2003, Electronic Gaming Monthly named Super Metroid the greatest video game ever made. IGN has ranked it in the top 10 a few times. Me? I’m not really there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, as I’m certainly not going to argue against Super Metroid being a masterpiece. It’s absolutely an all-timer and one of the best Metroidvanias ever made. Super Metroid is a milestone in world building, level design, enemy design, boss design, and pacing. But being in the G.O.A.T. discussion, though? I don’t see it. There’s just too many games that also act as milestones in the categories I mentioned while also offering something Super Metroid almost never offers: intuitive controls.

I liked this screen cap because it looks like Samus is posing with the newly-slain unholy abomination.

This was my third time playing all the way through Super Metroid and I still found myself fighting the controls. Nintendo knew this would happen, too. The game offered full button remapping options well before the days of emulation. I experimented with various configurations and came to the conclusion that it’s not possible to comfortably shoot, run, and jump at the same time. Which is a shame because I found plenty of situations where doing all three would have been helpful. By the end of the game, I was still struggling to perform the type of jump I intended to, and it was always jumping without the flips. It’s especially annoying when you intend to do a somersault so you can do a wall jump and the flipping part doesn’t happen. Jeez, as if the wall jumping isn’t awkward enough. I’m going to guess a lot of games that feature intuitive wall jumping studied Super Metroid on what not to do.

“Okay, I’ve seen Mario do this a hundred million times before. I’m sure it’ll be painless…….”

The only knock I have on the level design is that a tiny amount of the layouts aren’t optimized for platforming. It’s not so much “frustrating” as it is “exhausting.” There’s one specific jump early in the game that basically requires you to hold RUN down while jumping, which I didn’t prioritize with my control scheme so that kind of sucked. Thankfully, nothing like that really shows up again. Unfortunately, something even worse shows up: an area based around quicksand. You sink too quickly in it and get no height on your jumps unless you’re directly on the surface. It’s forced button-mashing, and this in a game where controls are already problematic. Thankfully it’s not all over the entire “level” for the lack of a better term, and I’ve basically run out of meaningful things to complain about.

Still plenty of nitpicks, though. The Space Jump and later the Screw Attack are awesome when they work, but the timing and angles feel fickle sometimes. I had a ton of moments where it seemed like I lost my ability to continue jumping for no reason. Though I’ll easily take this game’s Space Jump over Metroid: Zero Mission’s. It’s not even close.

The good news is that Super Metroid still holds up in every non-control way, even thirty years later. Zebes is one of my all-time favorite 2D settings. The ecosystem feels alive, which is pretty impressive for a 1994 game. Part of the reason this works is that you’re introduced to the planet in a state where it’s seemingly dead. The destruction from the original Metroid remains intact. While there’s some scattered life near the surface, when you return to the gigantic shaft that you had to escape from in the NES game, it’s in a state of decay. Okay, well, it blew up so presumably the fire sterilized it. Except, even the area where the Morphing Ball is shows no signs of life. That is, at least until you grab it and leave the area. After going back up the elevator you just came from, suddenly, there’s alien life everywhere and it all wants you dead. It’s like the planet itself played possum with you.

If I had made it far enough in the original Metroid, I probably would have appreciated this fake-out battle with “Kraid” more. For the record, I played the Metroid franchise in the complete wrong order and I’m pretty sure the only one I’ve ever played all the way through at launch was Metroid Prime, which was my first Metroid (and one of the games of my childhood I was the most hyped for when word started getting out that it was really good). Prime 2 was my second, then I played the two GBA games. I’m fairly certain Super Metroid was my fifth Metroid game, or sixth if I played the original Metroid first. If I did, it doesn’t matter because I shut it off very quickly, and I don’t remember ever finishing the third Metroid Prime game either. I still haven’t finished the re-release of Prime, either. I might never, actually. I played Prime when I was 13 and was blown away by the world building and attention to detail much more than I was the gameplay itself. I think it’s safe to say that Prime didn’t age as well as I thought it would have because so much of my enjoyment the first time was based around the presentation, set dressing, and bestiary.

Super Metroid was such a massive jump from the NES game that it might as well be a complete franchise restart. The room layouts are much smarter. There’s still a few single-block platforms, but the jumping physics are more generous. So is aiming your arm cannon thanks to the shoulder buttons. The combat excels, even when you have the ice beam equipped. Funny enough, I would have given anything to be able to toggle it on and off on the NES game, but I never bothered with the SNES game. The Ice Beam didn’t feel like it added sponge. Now my annoyance with combat was that you can’t Screw Attack frozen enemies late in the game. How does that make any sense? What about being frozen solid (which, in theory, should be lethal by itself, right?) prevents the energy that attack emits from working? And I’m not picking nits, either. I’m being dead f*cking serious over here, because it kind of messed with my immersion. Yes, really! I’m going there! I mean, how powerful can the Screw Attack be if it can’t even knock the ice cubes loose from the tray?

That isn’t picking nits. Complaining about this one-time set-piece taking too long? THAT is picking nits. The idea is you have to not kill this critter and let it destroy this otherwise indestructible wall in this corridor that’s roughly ten billion miles long, give or take. This whole room could have been shortened by 80% and still worked as intended in a puzzle sense. It’s not like there’s other things hidden in the room that necessitated this length. The only challenge is not firing upon the enemy for working too slowly, which in fairness might actually be the toughest aspect of the entire game. So very, very tempting.

I had to keep reminding myself that Super Metroid is only five years younger than me. The settings are just so elaborate and cool, and then they do things with those settings. A crocodile boss has a legitimate jump scare fake-out. Bosses have corpses with bugs feasting upon their flesh nearby. One boss has its babies drag off its lifeless corpse, which made me sad until I thought about it and realized they were probably going to eat it. But even that boss has a clever, genuinely immersive aspect to it. You COULD just pump missiles into it like you’ll do for every other boss. Or, you can do this with the normally less-lethal grappling hook:

“Well, at least the kids will be eating tonight, assuming the whole planet doesn’t blow up in about an hour or two.” By the way, I assumed when I first played Super Metroid in 2007 that this was the same species as the Parasite Queen from Metroid Prime, but apparently that’s unconfirmed or non-canon. I mean, they have the same shape and everything.

And electrocute its creepy ass. Now if this were the only way to kill it, meh, it’s just a slightly atypical boss fight with a unique method of combat. It’s the fact that it’s an alternative way of killing it that impresses me. That’s how you create a sense of immersion that you’re a resourceful intergalactic bounty hunter. Heck, the game even hides an easter egg during the final sequence that allows you to free the helpful creatures of Planet Zebes if you take a last second detour during the escape.

“Thank you for rescuing us. Can you point us in the direction of the breeding population of our species you no-doubt already rescued before you caused the chain reaction that blew up the entire planet?” “Beg your pardon?”

Super Metroid is so good at doing settings and set-pieces that it even does things that should be too silly or out-there for this genre really well. In any other game like this, I’d roll my eyes the moment a haunted ship shows up. “Ghosts? Really?” But Super Metroid plays it earnestly and it just works, partially because the ghosts feel organic enough that I’m willing to accept that they’re not really ghosts and just things using camouflage. In fact, my only real complaint about the scope of the game is how short the entire haunted ship section is. Part of that is the area surrounding the ship is part of the level. I imagine the justification was that it’s just a ship so it couldn’t be too big so they stuck it on top of a lake and made that part of the level. But the interior never feels like a spaceship from a layout perspective, and the outside lake area is probably the weakest themed area in the entire game. Thankfully they would do water better in the next level.

“Welcome back to ESPN’s coverage of the 20X7 Zebes Invitational. Bob Chozo was perfect through six frames but his last shot left the dreaded 7-10 split. The leftie has selected the Brunswick Samus. It must be new because I’m not familiar with this particular model of bowling ball. Either way, Chozo will have to settle for just the 7 pin and….. Hold on, what’s this? The ball has turned into some sort of robot with an arm cannon. It just shot the 10 pin. And now Chozo is arguing with the tournament director that nowhere in the rules of bowling does it state that you can’t use an intergalactic bounty hunter capable of transforming into a ball. Chozo’s opponent, Ivo Robotnick, seems nonplussed. The crowd thinks he should challenge but instead he’s reaching into his bag and changing balls. Wait, is that a bowling ball he’s holding or some sort of blue porcupine?”

Come to think about it, why are there two water-based sections in the game? Shouldn’t the lake have been part of the underwater area while the haunted ship got something more unique? I’m just bitching because the haunted ship is the most interesting area in the game. Well, at least when you first enter it, but I can’t say it was my favorite level because it’s just too damn short, and then the ghost theme goes away too quickly anyway. As soon as you beat the boss, which shows up relatively early once inside, it just becomes a generic building, really. The timing of when Phantoon is dropped is very strange, but then again, the timing for a large chunk of the middle of the game is weird.

It’s weird that such stock is put in these four bosses when there’s actually nine bosses total up to this point. The mid-bosses absolutely don’t feel like mid-bosses. A few of them are big enough and tough enough to be area bosses.

I almost wondered if there was meant to be one other stage before fighting Ridley. The pacing is never bad, mind you. The combat and layout is consistently good enough to overcome the strange structure of everything that comes after Kraid. If I have to complain, I’d say that I don’t think Super Metroid is exceptional at building a level to a crescendo. A few bosses feel like they’re just stumbled upon uneventfully. And no, the eyeball doors don’t count as “building-up.” I mean in the sense of tension and urgency. Even the placement of when the Baby Metroid attacks you in the final stage feels like it just sort of happens out of nowhere. They set up a few characters who collapse into dust, but the actual physical location on the map and the layout of the chamber it happens in feels, well, uneventful. This is the one and only area where I think Zero Mission is the superior game, as its level design properly builds up the big story moments and boss encounters.

Phantoon being the most obvious example of that because, once you’re actually in the ship, it doesn’t take very long to reach it. On one hand, I kind of dig the unconventional timing of when they spring this area’s big boss on you. On the other hand, hey fellas, this is why you do mid-bosses! Because after defeating Phantoon, the level isn’t done. All the electronics turn on and you can get the map and the doors can be opened. But the element that made the level interesting, the ghost aspect, is done for good. By the way, Phantoon was the only boss that put me within a hit or two of death and easily the hardest boss in the game.

Even though I did sh*t on the controls, don’t mistake that for me saying Super Metroid controls badly. They’re clunky, but they still get the job done. Hell, some aspects of the controls even manage to soar. The grappling hook is fun and intuitive to use. The morphing ball controls like a dream and there’s something so satisfying about jumping as the ball when you get the Spring Ball. Also satisfying is building up your speed boots. So even Super Metroid’s biggest weakness has elements that are exceptional. I still think the issues with jumping and some of the level design that further works against that puts it just out of reach of the GOAT conversation, but I can also totally understand why someone would say “f*ck it, it has my vote anyway!” It’s such a rich, vibrant game. Even the worst stuff, like cutting and pasting the final room from Metroid, somehow works here because of the better movement physics. And that final battle with Mother Brain is delightful.

“Dear Diary: Today I attacked the gigantic brain. While I succeeded in breaking its jar, the giant brain grew a goddamned cyborg tyrannosaurs body out from underneath it that ultimately shot me with what I think could be described as a “f*ck around and find out” beam. Okay, time for Plan B, and the other bounty hunters think I’m insane, but hear me out. Since she’s a gigantic brain, I just need to get my hands on some 245 Trioxin……….”

So, while I’m not on-board for Super Metroid’s sainthood, I still really love this game. It feels like it sets the perfect template for what a Metroidvania should have. Awesome level design with distinctive, memorable level layouts that make navigation a breeze. Plenty of hidden rooms and items (I’ve still never 100%ed the game, scoring 83% for this review). Impactful-feeling combat that never gets boring. A much stronger cast of enemies than the NES game. Tons of one-off set-pieces. Boss fights that are so good and usually well-staged. I love that even the mid-bosses are given a sense of importance that makes them feel equal to the big bosses. All this in a game that’s never stingy with the health or missile refills. Most importantly, the act of finding your way around is fun by itself. No matter where you are inside the game, you’re bound to find something likable and fun. Yes, even if there’s quicksand.

If you need to know how important set dressing a game properly is, play this, then play the first Metroid. It’s almost hard to believe they’re from the same franchise.

The weird thing is, I remembered Metroid: Zero Mission being equal to Super Metroid. I mean, I was SO certain it was basically the Super Metroid II in all but name in every way that mattered. Maybe because I played Zero Mission first and enjoyed it so much that I got the Virtual Console version of Super Metroid. When I replayed Zero Mission last year, I still had fun, but I walked away thinking “boy, did my memory overrated this or what?!” It’s a small game that also feels noticeably padded. So going into this review, I was a teeny tiny bit worried I’d be let down and it wouldn’t live up to my memory. Instead, I walked away after having as much fun as I thought I was going to have playing Zero: Mission last year and then some. I also set my expectations appropriately because I remembered how frustrating Super Metroid’s controls can be, especially the jumping and the wall jump. I’d forgotten how stiff Zero Mission’s jumping is, but I’ll never forget how demoralizing Super Metroid’s wall jump can be.

So wait, does this mean you only fought a Baby Kraid in the original Metroid? By the way, the actual character design throughout is memorable and striking.

I think if Super Metroid is capable of disappointing anyone who has never played it, it’ll be for someone who sees the insane rankings critics give it and expects a literal perfect game or a life-altering experience. It’s not either of those, at least in 2026. Maybe it once was, but these days the controls are disqualifying. That’s just how I feel, and in fact, I wouldn’t even call it the best SNES game as I’d easily vote for Yoshi’s Island over this. I might even put A Link to the Past above it. That’s fine, though, because I’m also saying I find it unlikely anyone could dislike Super Metroid. I, for one, think it’s okay to say a game is historically awesome and a must-play, but comes up just short of making it into the GOAT discussion. Just short. And meanwhile, Kid Icarus is still waiting for his 16-bit overhaul that resurrects his career and sets him up as a legitimate gaming icon. He probably saw Super Metroid and was like “oh yeah? Well at least I was on Captain N: The Game Master!”
Verdict: YES!

I was going to make another joke here but their sprites look sad and now I feel like a piece of sh*t again. Oh well, they died like an hour or two later. See! Time heals all wounds! Time and planet-exploding bombs!

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Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear (Game Boy Review)

January 30, 2026 by 7 Comments

Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear
Platform: Game Boy
Released January, 1990
Developed by Rare
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (?)

Well………. At least it looks good. I’ve played enough old school Game Boy releases now that I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by fantastic graphics, but I constantly am anyway. Don’t get me wrong: this is no Nemesis (as seen in Konami Shmups: The Definitive Review) but there were a few places where I was impressed with the graphics. Not so much the gameplay.

I thought the first NES Wizards & Warriors was barely okay. I thought its sequel, Ironsword, was one of the worst games I’ve played, and it certainly had the worst sword combat I’ve ever experienced. This Game Boy title, technically the third game in the franchise but called Chapter 10 for some reason, is sadly closer to Ironsword than the original and one of the worst Game Boy titles I’ve ever played. Now Wizards & Warriors isn’t exactly the most beloved game and is probably one of my more eyebrow-raising YES! verdicts, so I recently replayed it. I wanted to make sure my review session wasn’t some kind of fever dream. It wasn’t, and I’m still willing to argue that the NES original doesn’t deserve to be vilified. I think a lot of the contempt for W&W out there has to do with the misleading cover art that features a shirtless beefcake barbarian style “Warrior” when such a character doesn’t exist in the game. Not even close. Also, yeah, the sword sucked back then too, but I don’t even consider the sword to be the main weapon in the original game. The boomerang-like Dagger of Throwing, which you get about a minute or two into the first level, does all the heavy lifting for the combat and pairs perfectly with the jumping-based level layouts. (shrug) So yeah, I like the first Wizards & Warriors. I also get why people wouldn’t, and it’s not hard to figure out where the series went wrong.

Once again, the problem is that the entire game is based around this sword that just isn’t satisfying to use. For this Game Boy release, take Ironsword’s combat, which was meant to be the primary attack method of the original game, and subtract the ability to skewer enemies while jumping, giving the player even less versatility than ever before. That had been the most effective attack in the sequel since there was no Dagger of Throwing. In Fortress of Fear, there’s NO jumping attack at all and, as always, there’s no OOMPH to the combat at all. Your sword’s sprite and the enemy sprites don’t feel like they exist in the same dimension, and the underwhelming armpit fart noise when you hit them doesn’t exactly make me think they’re being impaled by sharpened metal. Enemies don’t even blink to register damage. THIS is the new “worst sword combat ever” game. And now I’m also convinced the Dagger of Throwing was a last-second addition to Wizards & Warriors 1 that they resented adding to the game. How else do you explain Rare not realizing how important it was besides outright spite?

You can do a big, cutting vertical slice but it’s slow and doesn’t do more damage than a basic jab with the sword that’s twice as fast. So, wow, Ironsword was somehow made worse. Unbelievable.

If fans of the original are disappointed in the combat, just wait until they realize even the genre is different. Despite the hero and several enemies from the original game appearing with nearly identical sprites (like the eagle above), Wizards & Warriors X isn’t played in a way that fans of the series would expect. Instead of having to explore, locate keys and grind-up resources, Wizards & Warriors X is a linear side-scrolling platformer. What the fudge? This style of combat isn’t suitable for that at all! That would have been true even in the best circumstances, but the level design is so basic and bland that it’s surprising nobody making the game realized what a stinkeroo it was. The designers leaned far too heavily into the idea of building levels around hold-your-breath long jumps onto tiny moving platforms. Of, if not long jumps, outright blind jumps. Sometimes I mean that literally, as you’ll actually land on the moving platform but it’s positioned just below the view of the playfield. It’s like they drew the maps for the dimensions of a normal 80s/90s picture tube TV only to realize the Game Boy used a different aspect ratio. It happens a few times and it’s so inelegant. So are the amount of necessary jumps that have unavoidable falling damage.

This game couldn’t even do doors right. If a door is on the left wall, you can’t see it. So you have to bump into doors.

And the bad decisions keep coming. There’s chests and keys like before, but only two items of substance are found in the chests. One is a shield that, as far as I can tell, does nothing. Allegedly it halves your damage, but I didn’t notice it working. The “Boots of Jumping” increase your jumping height and length, but they’re lost if you die. Since collision is bad and your attacks are worse, with enemies seemingly tailored for jumping-based combat that wasn’t included, you’ll die a lot. It took until the final level of the game for Wizards & Warriors X to even get a heart beat since the level is set-up like a maze. But it must have just been the gas escaping postmortem because like two minutes later I beat the game just moving straight and taking doors when I came to them, then just stabbing the last boss blindly (and dying four times in the process) until he died.

The last boss has no room to dodge.What’s even dirtier is that in order to get to these platforms, you have to jump from a higher platform and accept fall damage. That happens a lot in Wizards & Warriors X. The game literally does nothing right from a gameplay perspective. The only nice thing I could think of to say about it? “It’s better than Castlevania: The Adventure.”

The total time investment is about 20 to 30 minutes. I want it back. I even kind of regret having to concede that the graphics are really good, because when a game that’s this bad looks as good as Wizards & Warriors on Game Boy does, it becomes almost sinister. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, of course, but when a bad game looks fun in still photos (such as the kind on the back of a box, for example) it feels cynical to me. So Fortress of Fear’s negative reputation is well-earned. Horrible game. It’s astonishing how far this potentially huge game franchise fell after the first title. Did anyone involved in a sequel not realize how much all the fun in the first game relied on the ultra-satisfying Dagger of Throwing? I’d say “one of these days, I need to play the first Wizards & Warriors without ever getting it.” Then again, with Ironsword and now Fortress of Fear, I’ve already sort of done that twice, haven’t I?
Verdict: NO!

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Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park, aka Athletic Land (Colecovision/MSX Reviews) Plus Bonus Reviews of the Unreleased Atari 2600 Version and Athletic World – The Indie Sequel for Game Boy!

January 26, 2026 by Leave a comment

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
aka Athletic Land
Wait! Don’t Go! I swear this isn’t a joke review!
Platform: Colecovision and MSX
Released in 1984
Developed by Konami
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

(Colecovision) Can you tell how deliberate I was in picking this picture first? By the way, Cabbage Patch Kids was the first toy that caused Black Friday riots. Not stampedes, but actual f*cking riots! The dolls were the biggest hit Coleco had EVER had in their entire company’s history. Far more profitable than Colecovision (it’s not even close), but they’re also proof positive that Arnold Greenberg was one of the worst CEOs in the history of gaming or toys. He was awesome at “step one” and not so awesome at any step that followed. Every single hit product Coleco had once he took over in 1975 he eventually turned into a loss leader. Colecovision gave birth to the Adam Computer, the business Greenberg REALLY wanted to be in and pushed hard for even though they had no infrastructure for home computer development or manufacturing (it’s not remotely close to the same infrastructure a game console utilizes). Then he ignored engineers who told him it wasn’t ready or any good and pushed it into production. Today the Coleco Adam is largely considered the one of the worst computers ever. Cabbage Patch Kids went from BILLIONS in sales to record-setting inventory crush in a three year span when he ignored established toy trends. Coleco was the #1 toy maker in the world in 1984 and bankrupt by 1988. The guy who greenlit all those hit products also didn’t have a clue about managing them. But hey Arnie, thanks for Colecovision. I do loves me some Colecovision.

You’d probably figure Cabbage Patch Kids would be a game for young children. An “edutainment” game along the lines of Reader Rabbit, right? Nope. Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park is basically the Colecovision’s version of Pitfall!, the David Crane classic (yes, I’m aware Colecovision does have a real port of Pitfall! too) mixed with a little bit of the reality competition Ninja Warrior with challenges like skipping across pillars and trampolines. It’s also one of those games people like me discover and are always shocked to find out it’s “really good!” that, upon revisit, I’ve dropped down to “it’s fine.” It’s still a remarkable achievement given how early this was in the genre though and an underrated showcase for what would soon be gaming’s #1 genre.

(Colecovision) That is one smug looking main character. If this game had been more popular, the fish would have gone down as one of the most notorious gaming antagonists. Trust me on this. I’ll also note that the last jump is one of the most deceptively difficult challenges in gaming. Any attempt at jumping off when the platform is anywhere but the lowest it gets or maybe one tick above the lowest will result in a death. Now a modern game would probably do a better job of conveying that and maybe have a line or maybe the platform itself lights green for jump and red for don’t jump. But for a platformer made early in the genre’s learning curve, this is impressive.

In the game, you scroll one screen at a time to the right and jump over and across different things. Make no mistake about it, this is a shameless Pitfall! rip-off, in style and substance. And, like Pitfall!, Cabbage Patch Kids’ problem is the genre has come so very far from the trail that it helped blaze. As an early platformer, there’s only a handful of challenges here that are mixed and matched, but they’re not always optimized for maximum gameplay. Actually, “a handful” isn’t entirely accurate, because when I actually counted-up the amount of things Cabbage has that can kill you, I was kind of stunned. By my tally, there are ten possible primary hazards (eleven if you count the timer) and seven supplementary hazards that can be mixed-and-matched with them. In the above screenshot, in addition to the moving platforms, I had to avoid the dreaded fish. In a screen with the trampolines, I might be hopping across mini-ponds that have the fish while also avoiding spiders that fall from above.

(Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for MSX) This is a “sock it to you” level: water to jump over with fish jumping out of the water, spiders raining down on you, and a camp fire right at the end that you have to jump over (a tight squeeze between it and the final pond) that also spits fireballs at you.

So they actually squeezed more millage out of the obstacles than I realized and props to them for that. But, once you have the timing down, Cabbage Patch Kids is really just requires patience. With the fish, the fire, the ropes, the spiders, and the moving platforms, it’s just a matter of waiting for an opening. Within an hour of starting, the only obstacle that consistently got me killed was the fire, and only when it’s positioned like it is in the above screenshot, where there’s barely any room to jump over it. Because it fires projectiles, the timing of when it’s even safe to stand on the space between it and the water is tricky. Maybe that’s where the Cabbage Patch Kids license actually factors in and this is baby’s first platformer. Probably not since some of the screens are pretty hardcore in the amount of stuff they throw at you. They also missed several chances for risk-reward temptations. Plus there’s the occasional head-scratching empty screen. Those really weirded me out, because the empty screens happen even deep into the game. Here is one on the 68th screen of the game.

(Cabbage Patch Kids for MSX) There was literally no challenge on this screen. Just walk right and don’t stop to smell the flowers since the timer is still running. Or maybe the challenge is sensory deprivation, and the object is to not be lost in isolation of your own internal madness. Probably not since I didn’t die on it once.

Sometimes my readers get angry or confused by my constant usage of “it’s fine.” Which is strange because “it’s fine” always means, at the very least, “I had more fun than not” which is an automatic YES! because that’s my criteria at its most basic. And Cabbage Patch Kids is fine, truly! I’m giving it a YES! and everything. But yeah, I mostly use “it’s fine” for games that I or others have overrated. In the case of Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park, it’s a solid platformer that was ambitious for its era and does a good job with the limits it had, but the fun isn’t endless and it’s certainly not an all-time great. Even if it’s not making gameplay mistakes, it’s just too limited and too easy to clock. My only real gameplay annoyance was how rigid the trampolines are to use. You want to hold RIGHT and press the jump button when your feet are about to make contact.

(Cabbage Patch Kids for MSX) This apple is the only bonus points item in the game and it only appears in trampoline levels. It only scores 200 points, which is nothing when you consider you get 2,000 points just for finishing a group of ten stages. Hell, sometimes I genuinely think the apple is impossible to get if it’s in the wrong position on screens with spiders/coconuts. I’m kind of fine with that too because it feels like it’s there to tempt players. What the game could have used to give it some extra score-chasing mileage is more risk-reward chances. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if every screen had a fruit. Having only one feels like it was there because an executive said “add some items to collect! Kids love that sh*t!”

At first I thought Konami realized they burned a pretty damn decent action game on Cabbage Patch Kids of all things because they re-released this for the MSX under the name “Athletic Land.” Except it appears to be the other way around. Athletic Land was either already out or already nearing the end of development (release dates for MSX being fickle) and Coleco had a good working relationship with Konami, plus the MSX and Colecovision are very, very compatible. To put it in perspective, the MSX emulator I use is also my Colecovision emulator. Either way, Konami just quickly flipped Athletic Land to Cabbage Patch Kids, and it’s a good thing they did because that gives this a fighting chance at a modern re-release if Konami ever decides to put out another MSX collection. Three volumes of ten MSX games were released for the original PlayStation exclusively in Japan from 1997 to 1998 (that were combined and released as one big set for the Sega Saturn) and Volume 2 has Athletic Land. Great sign that this is a modern re-release candidate. The problem is that Athletic Land is visually just a minor upgrade of the Colecovision Cabbage Patch Kids game while the MSX Cabbage Patch Kids has some pizzazz and is the only game that lets you custom-create your character. In the three screens below, Coleco Cabbage Patch Kids is on the left, the MSX version is in the center, and Athletic Kids is on the right.

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for Colecovision
Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for MSX
Athletic World for MSX

Note that all three of those screenshots were taken on level 36. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just the placebo effect, but I think Athletic World might be slightly, slightly harder than the other two in terms of timing, but if it actually is, it’s negligible. Overall, for such an early platformer, Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch Kids aged remarkably well. Plus it controls a little better than the original Atari 2600 Pitfall!, though it’s very picky about what jumps land and which ones don’t. I jumped a little too early once hopping onto the first log on a screen and died from the jump somehow. It probably counts as walking into the log, which is fatal. I only did it once and never again because I learned my lesson. So while it’s not age-proof, Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park/Athletic Land is fun enough for thirty minutes, making it an ideal addition to a compilation. Not an all-time classic, but for sure one of the all-time hidden gems. I kind of feel sorry that the game is tied to Cabbage Patch Kids. I imagine a lot of kids who were too cool to play a game based on dolls never bothered to give it a try. Their loss.
Verdict: YES! YES! and YES!

BONUS REVIEWS

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Completed Prototype
Designed by Ed Temple
Developed by Coleco
NEVER BEEN (officially) RELEASED

My first GAME OVER came on the 4th screen of the game. Yeah.

Oh the Atari fans are going to hate this review. Apparently Cabbage Patch Kids is considered one of the best unreleased prototypes, but I’m not there. It IS impressive, don’t get me wrong, but the jumping physics are very strange. Like, some of the weirdest I’ve ever played. You don’t actually have to press a direction when you jump. You’ll move forward automatically, but the actual trajectory of the jumps are these high, shallow arches. It’s so weird. You kind of have to just play it to appreciate it. The game is certainly tailored around it, though. All the platforms or waterholes are spaced correctly to accommodate the actual length you travel, and you can change direct mid-jump too. That’s the only way you can do a straight up-and-down jump.

Cabbage Patch Kids (Atari 2600)
Cabbage Patch Kids (Atari 2600)
Cabbage Patch Kids (Atari 2600)

While all the obstacles are here, the trampolines are much harder to use, and there’s less of them (thank god). The character looks like someone wearing bunny ears, the sound effects and music are a dental drill to the eardrums and the bees look more like the disembodied torsos of women. Plus, collision is a little bit on the picky side, but on the other hand, you can get away with some things you can’t get away with in the other versions. Like at one point during the log platforms, I jumped directly from the second-to-last log to the ground and didn’t die. Also, you don’t die from jumping off too high a point on the moving platforms. But what really killed Cabbage Patch Kids 2600 for me was that the angles of the gaps are much easier because of the automatic movement. Once I stopped trying to move on my own and realized the game did the hard part for me, I went from losing all my lives on the fourth screen to barely needing to do any work at all, and I just stopped having fun. It’s a good effort, truly, but I didn’t like this at all. Sorry, Atari fans, but Alligator People is still the superior 3rd party unreleased Atari prototype.
Verdict: NO!

Athletic World
Indie Remake of Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch Kids
Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced
Released April 12, 2023
Developed by MHZ Games
Download the ROM – Pay What You Want
Link to Store for Physical Copy

Leave it to an indie developer to make the greatest game in this series!

What a damn impressive effort Athletic World is. The name is a bit confusing since Athletic World is also the name of an unrelated NES game that was designed for use with the Power Pad. But, make no mistake, THIS Athletic World is exactly what an early-era Game Boy port/sequel of Cabbage Patch Kids/Athletic Land would have been, and it’s an outstanding game that would make the original designers proud (at least I hope so). It adds new obstacles, and the timing of the moving obstacles is much, much more fine-tuned to create an optimized challenge. So, I want to get the message out there, to anyone who aspires to make a modern tribute to a classic game, download this ROM, get a pen and paper, and start taking some notes.

Athletic World kept surprising me. After over 80 stages and having gone a while before any new obstacles were introduced, I was organizing my thoughts and shaking my head at how well made this was and BOOM, another new obstacle: a snake. Huh.

First off, the authenticity of an early-era Game Boy title is astonishing. Every aspect of this feels exactly like a launch-window game for that platform, but in a good way. Athletic World has charming sprite work, sound effects, and a good chiptune. The designer didn’t take advantage of having more resources available to them than a designer at the time might have had. I’m not some kind of purist and often point out that there’s nothing inherently noble or sacred about the limits developers had because, make no mistake, studios of that time frame would have crawled on shards of glass to have higher storage capacity. But because Athletic World is such a simple game, I think it actually lends charm to the experience. Other than including Super Game Boy features, Athletic World has a small file size and feels the part, but it works because it’s the gameplay that’s optimized, not the appearance.

This is one of the new obstacles and it looks so simple. It’s just a tiny little stick on a rope that swivels (right before I hit publish Angela said “I think it’s supposed to be a tire swing.” Maybe?). If you can actually hop on it, I never figured out how (and not for a lack of trying, I assure you). It’s really hard to clock by itself. It’s rarely by itself, too.

All the obstacles of the original games are back, but the jumping physics aren’t. Jumping is much shorter and stiffer in this one. The bouncing balls and other obstacles can’t be survived just by jumping straight up and down. You have to be moving forward or backward, and the obstacles take advantage of this. The biggest change isn’t the new obstacles, but how fine-tuned all the obstacles can be. I said about the Coleco/MSX games that once you have the timing down, it’s just a matter of waiting for an opening. While the same theory applies here, that window is much shorter. The genre might be platforming, but the action feels more like a Frogger-style cross-the-road game at times and you’ll likely find yourself wiggling back and forth waiting for things to line-up in a way that you can make your short jumps.

Weirdly (perhaps sadly) the blank screens return, only instead of being absolutely nothing, your cat (or a dog if you play as the boy) is waiting for you. Sometimes it leaves a bonus fruit for you, and sometimes it takes a sh*t and if you step on it you lose 700 points. I’m not joking. Cute clapback to the original, I guess, but I wish these would have been dumped altogether. Heh, dumped. It’s funny because you’re jumping over sh*t.

The new obstacles are mostly winners. One of them sees you clinging to the side poles that you slowly start to lose your grip on. I never died on that screen or even came close and had to deliberately wait and see how long it takes to lose your grip, so perhaps that should have been reworked. The swinging stick I already showed off is the hardest new challenge, and there’s also disappearing platforms and a new style of dive-bombing bird. This game also has a climax too! After 99 screens, you have to follow your pet and rush as fast as you can through ten screens (just don’t try to copy the pet, since they can jump on things that kill you. Learned that the hard way). You can’t wait for an opening because you’re being chased by bees, but this is where the fine-tuned design shines brightest. And after you finish this and get the game’s ending, guess what? There’s a second quest that’s much harder. Hot damn, this developer went all-out. My biggest complaint is that, once you reach second quest, there’s no option to skip straight to it if you turn the game off. If the developer reads this and there’s a cheat code, you need to alert GameFAQs.

It’s actually well done. Again, he did a great job of fine-tuning.

So, this really is everything you’d want a sequel/remake to Athletic Land if the franchise had lasted past the MSX. It even has the Konami code in it! While I was playing Athletic World, I kept thinking “I really hope the developer is proud of this game.” I mean, I sincerely hope that about every indie game I play, even the ones I don’t like, but Athletic World succeeds on so many levels and is probably doomed to remain obscure. Why wouldn’t it? A fan-made Game Boy tribute to a game already deeply under the radar? Christ, I’d be stunned if this sold 100 copies (my friend Saud ordered one of the physical carts right before I published this, so make it 101). Yet, its existence fills me with joy. Athletic World is, no joke, one of the best Game Boy titles I’ve reviewed yet. It makes very few mistakes, pays proper tribute to an older game, and it does all that while perfectly mimicking a specific style of game on a black and white platform. Most importantly, Athletic World remembers that there’s no better way to show your love for a game than making a better version of it. CELEBRATE THAT! How can anyone who loves gaming not feel a little warm inside that something like this could exist? Athletic World is everything good about indie gaming tributes with none of the bullsh*t, and I love it.
Verdict: YES!
And seriously, give it a try and if you enjoy it, kick the dev a few bucks, or hell, order a physical copy!

 

Filed under New Games for Retro Platforms, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Goonies (MSX Review)

January 23, 2026 by Leave a comment

The Goonies
Platform: MSX
Released December 23, 1985 OR Early 1986
Developed by Konami
Released Only in Japan and South America
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Do you know what sucks about The Goonies for MSX? On the off-chance the NES versions of Goonies 1 & 2 get a re-release (and I think it could happen, either directly from Konami or via a middleman like Limited Run Games) the MSX game will be left in the dust when it has a legitimate claim to being the best game in the series, depending on the type of game you want. Goonies II is one of the best early Metroidvanias, but if you want a quick and dirty retro PC style platformer that plays really well, this could be the best game in the franchise. So, if you enjoy this review, show it to your favorite retro game publishers so the MSX build doesn’t get left behind. My heart already aches for MSX’s lack of modern clout, but licensed games for it are likely never getting a second chance because they’re so far off the radar that I doubt anyone will bother. Let’s change that as a community! Talk about MSX with retro publishers. Talk about how these games aren’t just stripped-down titles, but unique titles with their own gameplay merits. It’s really up to everyone to create awareness of this platform to modern publishers.

Ah, the MSX. I’ve really come to appreciate it for its unique takes on established games. Whether it be an exploration-based version of the original Castlevania or one-off sequels in the Gradius franchise (MSX was arguably the big winner of the 76 game Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review), this is a platform that practically demands my attention. So when I found out that its version of The Goonies was heavily modified from the Famicom game, I was intrigued. Technically I don’t have a review of the console version of the Goonies up, but I do have one for its arcade counterpart, Vs. The Goonies, which is essentially the same game, and I wasn’t a fan. The Goonies for MSX seems similar, right? It has almost the same chiptune version of “Goonies R Good Enough,” a similar cave setting, an unsatisfying attack and items that are hidden in arbitrary places. But worry not, because Goonies on the MSX is far and away the superior Goonies 1 video game and one of the best MSX titles I’ve played yet. It doesn’t do a lot and it doesn’t last very long, but it still manages to be basically non-stop fun.

Don’t let the “EXP” meter fool you into thinking this has RPG elements. When you kill an enemy, the EXP meter fills up a little bit. When it fills up all the way, you get a little bit of health back.

The Goonies on MSX is just a lite-on-frills platformer set in a maze. The game is divided into five levels and the object is to collect all seven Goonies in each level and then find an exit. The Goonies are behind locked doors, but keys are just lying around. You don’t have to kill a single enemy to collect one. There’s no bombing doors like in the Famicom version. The catch is you can only hold one key at a time, but that’s not a problem at all. There’s A LOT more keys than there are locked doors. Maybe too many, actually. Even on the fifth and final level there’s literally caches of keys that went almost entirely unused. However, not every locked door has a Goonie. Some will have potions that restore your health, while others might rarely trigger the hidden items. Worst case is a door might be double-locked, but I never had to travel too far to get the second key. The final door on each level is marked with a skull and crossbones, but once you have the seventh Goonie, just return to it and walk through it to beat the level. There’s no bosses, so really this is just a search for the Goonies.

Sadly, caves are the only setting. They usually are either red, blue, and green to make each section distinctive. Exclusively in level four, one of its areas had yellow caves, and I almost fainted from sensory overload.

Notice that giant skull in the above pic? It’ll swap you around to different areas of each level. Every screen is marked with a different “scene” number which is confusing and unhelpful. Thankfully the different areas in each stage are short, making backtracking as non-annoying as I’ve ever seen in any game. The numbering of the scenes might throw you off at first. The first door you encounter in a level could jump you a few scenes ahead of where you would expect to be, but you can always go backwards if you need to. Fans of drawing your own maps will probably really dig this one, and it’s a cinch thanks to the MSX’s limitation that prevents scrolling.

You can see what the final door looks like in the upper-left corner. You might encounter it quite early in a stage. Also, notice those water sprays? They’re practically the chief antagonist of the whole game.

The hidden items are back and some are hidden in arbitrary spots again. Sometimes you might have to jump where a waterfall is, kill X amount of enemies on a specific screen, or punch a specific rock. The items can really nerf the game too, including preventing the Fratellis from attacking you. There’s also hidden items that are actually whammies and do things like make endless ghosts spawn (you REALLY don’t want that one) or increase the attack speed of enemies and the Fratellis. I have no idea why they did that. Some items eventually wear out, too. The first one I found was a helmet, and then halfway through the third level I noticed it was gone. Others are permanent, including the whammies.

There’s so many skulls that levels can feel overwhelming at first, but since each area is pretty small, it’s hard to get lost. Backtracking never ate up more than a minute or two and most areas have multiple pathways to navigate. You also don’t die from falling so you can skip the slower vines and just jump down if you need to.

And that’s really all there is to Goonies MSX. As basic as it is, the level design is actually the highlight of the game. Levels are like labyrinths, but other than the numbering system, they’re not that confusing and it’s actually a lot of fun to clear out each new area. Finding a new Goonie is always satisfying, and if I had to complain, I guess I wish the items were hidden behind locked doors instead of shoved in arbitrary places that require arbitrary actions to unlock. They certainly had places they could have put them, because there’s way too many healing potions behind locks. Since you heal from killing X amount of enemies, I think they could have ditched some of them and replaced them with more logical placements of the items behind locked doors. Hell, they could have also created more reasons to use keys, like placing more locks on the doors that have the overpowered items, like the ones that prevent damage from gunshots or waterfalls. On the other hand, the over abundance of keys did ensure a zippy pace. The game flies by and never has a chance to get boring. I wish there had been a hard mode or a second quest, because I would have done it.

The Fratellis use the Mikey sprite, only painted a single color. It makes them look kind of like Mr. Game & Watch. But they use the same attack patterns as they do in the NES games, including one that shoots music notes at you.

The biggest drawback is the combat still sucks. You have to punch all enemies when they’re right next to you. The punch has limited range and is your only option since you can’t even get a slingshot in this game. Or, if you can, I never found it. Thankfully most enemies have easy-to-clock attack patterns and die from a single punch. The Fratellis work the same way they do in the Famicom games, where they can’t be killed and instead are only knocked out for a few moments. The rats are replaced with skulls, and there’s also bats, skeletons, and spongy-ass ghosts that you’ll want to just run away from since they don’t chase you from screen-to-screen like the Fratellis do and they take multiple hits to kill. ANY variety in the combat would have been welcome, but it’s not a deal breaker. Again, the breakneck pace, unusual for this style of game, voids any frustration with the combat.

As you can see at the bottom of the screen, I had so many items by the end of the game that I didn’t have room for anymore.

Goonies on MSX isn’t going to change your life or anything, but it’s a damn solid waste of an hour or two. It’s a wonderful example of “less is more” because it strips out the tiring need to grind-up bombs like in the Famicom game and just focuses on navigation. Since jumping is done by pressing UP, it took me a little while to get used to the controls, but after that? I guess I just dig this type of exploration-based item hunt. Of course I wish the game offered a bigger variety of settings and music, but as far as stripped-down ports go, this is one of the better ones out there. It’s a simple game, though. I think they could have toned back the amount of keys even if that means having to backtrack more, because the game is probably too easy. But it’s fun, and that’s all I care about. Assuming Konami ever does make a deal to re-release the Goonies titles associated with the NES/Famicom, I know it’s a long shot but I hope they remember this version. As I said in my Tempest 2000 review (in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story – The Definitive Review), sometimes a +1 is a positive thing. Goonies for MSX would be a marvelous +1 throw-in bonus for a 2 in 1 Goonies pack that’s anchored by the underrated classic Goonies II. And by the way, 2026 is the 40th anniversary of the Famicom original. I’m just saying!
Verdict: YES!

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